A U.S. District court has rejected a class-action lawsuit against technology giant Apple, Inc. (AAPL) that charged it of violating antitrust laws related to its iPod portable music players, according to media reports on Tuesday.
The class-action lawsuit, reportedly representing about eight million affected consumers, unsuccessfully sought $350 million in damages for the consumers and businesses, which could have been tripled under antitrust laws. The decade-old lawsuit was initially filed in January 2005.
"We thank the jury for their service and we applaud their verdict. We created iPod and iTunes to give our customers the world's best way to listen to music. Every time we've updated those products — and every Apple product over the years — we've done it to make the user experience even better," Apple said in a statement.
Apple was charged of suppressing competition and hurting consumers by updating software for the iPod in such a way that it would play songs only from its iTunes music store.
The consumers were forced to buy iPods at inflated prices between 2006 and 2009, instead of cheaper music players made by competitors, in order to play legal music downloaded from iTunes and also from other music stores. However, Apple then blocked the songs from other music stores through software updates to the iPod.
Cupertino, California-based Apple is said to have tweaked the iPod to block competition by preventing it from playing songs in Apple's music format from other companies' music stores. This prevented Apple's competitors from marketing products that were made compatible by them for the iPod.
However, Apple has argued that the 2006 and 2007 software updates to iTunes included significant upgrades that helped consumers, which prevent music piracy and hacking.
The eight-person jury in the U.S. District Court in Oakland, California unanimously agreed and found that Apple software updates were focused on genuine product improvement and did not violate antitrust laws. The opening arguments before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Apple iPod iTunes Antitrust trial began on December 2.
The court even heard a video disposition by Apple's late co-Founder and CEO Steve Jobs, who died in October 2011, to reach a verdict. Jobs' testimony, recorded in April 2011, reportedly highlighted the actions he took to protect and promote Apple. iTunes chief Eddy Cue and head of marketing Phil Schiller also testified during the trial.
AAPL closed Tuesday's regular trading session at $106.75, down $1.48 or 1.37% on a volume of 60.79 million shares.
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