iSuit

I always thought it was odd that Microsoft got targeted for an antitrust suit while Apple, which does a lot more in the way of "bundling" (all Macs, after all, run MacOS) than MS. But that doesn't mean that this new suit filed against Apple for selling tracks on iTunes that only play on the iPod, makes much more sense. The claim (emphasis below mine) is that:

Apple has unlawfully bundled, tied, and/or leveraged its monopoly in the market for the sale of legal online digital music recordings to thwart competition in the separate market for portable hard drive digital music players, and vice-versa.

Apple has a monopoly in portable digital music players? That'll be news to all the folks I know who own a Rio or one of these. And iTunes is a monopoly too? Funny, since the article goes on to mention:

Apple's online music store uses a different format for songs than Napster, Musicmatch, RealPlayer and others.

The customer filing the suit seems to have an idiosyncratic definition of "monopoly." Maybe he's thinking different.

UPDATE: D'oh, right. And as commenter AJS notes, you can always burn the tracks you bought off iTunes to a CD, then rip 'em to whatever format you like to put on your non-iPod portable. Which is admittedly a pain in the ass, but it means it's not even true that you need to buy an iPod to make your iTunes tracks portable.