Apple Inc.’s share price down, wins iPod case for violation of antitrust laws by suppressing competition

Apple Inc. discharged of a lawsuit estimated to $1 billion after a jury ruled in favour of the U.S.-based tech giant in a case filed by some iPod users, who claimed that the company violated antitrust laws by suppressing competition through some software updates for the mobile device. The jurys decision was unanimous.

Apple said in an official statement after the verdict, cited by Bloomberg: “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.”

The U.S. Jury decided that Apple did not act improperly when restricting music purchases for its iPod users after only three hours of deliberations. The court said that the changes, which were implemented by the company to the iTunes software of the players, were genuine improvements of earlier versions.

According to the ruling, Apple did not make an attempt of restricting or preventing music sold by its competitors from working on its iPod device. Under the U.S. law, a company cannot be found guilty of unfair competition in case a product change is considered as an improvement of a previous version for customers.

Michael Carrier, a law professor at Rutgers University, commented on the courts ruling for the Wall Street Journal: “Very few of these cases make it this far.” He also added that defendants such as Apple only need to show “a little bit of a product improvement and then it gets thrown out”.

Some of the companys iPod users claimed that Apple made changes to its iTunes music service in order to make it non-compatible to devices produced by competitive companies. The tech giant questioned these claims and argued that the updates were implemented in order to boost the softwares security and guard the users against hackers breaches.

The Attorney of the company, Bill Isaacson, told the U.S. jury that the opposition did not manage to prove that a single iPod user was unfairly prevented from using the application or was harmed in any way of Apples software improvements.

Apple Inc. was down 1.37% to close at $106.75 per share yesterday, marking a one-year gain of 34.03%. The company is valued at $656.57 billion. Apples shares traded at €85.401 in Frankfurt as of 8:10 GMT. According to CNN Money, the 44 analysts offering 12-month price forecasts for Apple Inc. have a median target of $122.50, with a high estimate of $150.00 and a low estimate of $60.00. The median estimate represents a +14.76% increase from the last price of $106.75.