Sam Oliver
Apple has asked for the dismissal of a 2011 suit that claims the company has a monopoly over applications available for download on the iPhone.
The two-year-old lawsuit accuses Apple of monopolistic practices by preventing developers from selling their software at a discounted price anywhere else. Apple takes a 30 percent cut of all content sold through the App Store, and its rules dictate that content providers cannot charge less for the same material sold elsewhere.
But Apple believes the suit should be tossed, according to Bloomberg, because the company doesn't set the price for paid application, and there are no antitrust laws against charging a price for distribution of a product.
Apple asked U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to dismiss the suit in a hearing held in Oakland, Calif., this week. The same judge will also oversee a separate antitrust lawsuit that accuses Apple's iTunes of holding a monopoly position in the music downloading market.
The original app monopoly lawsuit was filed by seven consumers. An attorney representing the plaintiffs argued against the case being dismissed, noting that iPhone users cannot go anywhere but Apple's App Store to buy Angry Birds for their device.
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38 Comments
Think someone needs to smack the plaintiffs round the head with a "it's not a crime to hold a monopoly, it's a crime to abuse a monopoly" mallet. No DRM on music and the web as an open environment for app developers, as well as "iPhone apps" and "music downloads" not being industries in themselves means this is a pile of non-issue.
And buying the iPhone is an option to everyone, unlike the times when we were forced to use crappy windows machines.
Apple can do what they want. Don't you like it? Don't buy it.
Microsoft also has the right to do the same thing with windows 8, as they should. We have choice now.
Same, please edit your tag line. Did you mean to say "Apple asks for" instead of "Apple has for"? I usually don't comment on typos but please proofread your articles, especially the short ones. As for those consumers who want to go to a different store for iPhone apps all I can ask is why? The App Store is web based as would any other potential competitor. Do they expect to get those $0.99 apps for $0.98?
This is not about consumers. This is about lawyers trying to make big bucks on class action lawsuits. Ever get a legal notice about those based upon stocks that you've owned? The shareholders get a few pennies per share and the law firm gets $200 million. In most cases, it's not even worth my time to fill out the forms. Having said that, I think there is a slight chance a court could rule that Apple's insistence on exclusivity is abusive. Think about it: in the iTunes store, you can sell an MP3 track via Apple and also sell it elsewhere. Apple only gets their 30% on what you sell in their store. Why should the app store work any differently? On the other hand, if Apple did permit apps to be sold elsewhere, someone could open a copycat app store and charge developers 20% instead of 30% and that could be considered unfair (although not illegal). Perhaps there's a middle ground where developers can sell their apps on their own websites, but not via other distributors. I think this would be especially helpful to those developers whose apps don't "float to the top" of Apple's site. With 300,000 apps on Apple's site, most apps have virtually no visibility. And I bet the top 100 apps generate 90% of Apple's revenue anyway.
I have recently begun to refuse to to participate in class action suits. It does me no good and only serves to cause prices to increase, IMHO, as lawyers get huge pay days and nothing changes.