After posting about the Hymn project yesterday, I found an article about Apple and a monopoly lawsuit filed against the company. The complaint is about the dependency between iTunes and iPods. Music and videos purchased on iTunes do not work with portable players other than iPods, and iPods cannot play music purchased online from competitors. An interesting point is that the lawsuit argues that the iPod hardware by default supports the WMA (Windows Media Audio) format, but that it is disabled purposely in iPods.

It is interesting that Apple is now dominant enough in the music industry to provoke antitrust lawsuits. They have certainly dominated digital media players. Microsoft’s mp3 player, the Zune, did not do well in sales over the holidays just after it was released. I don’t think the fact that you can’t play iTunes music on other players affected this. The Zune just doesn’t offer enough of a significant advantage over iPods to entice people to switch. The only interesting feature they added was the ability to share songs between Zunes, but there is a huge limitation on this type of sharing — you can only listen to the song three times or for three days, whichever comes first. Is that really such an advantage over borrowing your friend’s player for a few minutes? I have not seen the software that comes with the Zune, but it is hard to beat iTunes, despite the DRM limitations on purchased music. The iTunes has a clean, easy to use interface with interesting capabilities like dynamic playlists. So does the antitrust lawsuit have merit? It will be very interesting to see the results.