Think the slew of class action lawsuits against Apple are coming to an end? Think again. The latest lawsuit to hit the Cupertino, CA. company comes from Apple’s home-state of California. Timothy Smith filed the class action lawsuit in San Jose (just a stone’s throw away from Apple’s headquarters, by the way) last Friday. In the suit, Smith accuses Apple of breaking anti-trust regulations and purposefully bricking unlocked iPhones.
As is the case with most class-action lawsuits, Smith is asking for unspecified monetary compensation in addition to Apple being barred from selling locked iPhones and requiring them to extend warranty support to owners of unlocked iPhones. The class-action filing complained that “Apple forced plaintiff and the class members to pay substantially more for the iPhone and cell phone service than they would have paid in a competitive marketplace either for the iPhone or for AT&T’s cell phone service.”
According to an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, owners of mobile phones have a right to unlock the device for personal use. Apple’s move to brick unlocked iPhones with the v1.1.1 firmware update was a violation of consumer rights. “Apple acted in defiance and without sufficient consideration of consumers’ rights to unlock their iPhones because it knew that the probable result of its update would be to render unlocked iPhones inoperable,” reads the suit.
If you want to get in on this class-action lawsuit (warning: PDF link), head on over to appleiphonelawsuit.com to see if you qualify to be part of this class-action. If you’ve paid a termination fee to your previous carrier in order to use the iPhone, have had your unlocked iPhone bricked by the v1.1.1 update, or lost all your third-party applications due to the update, you qualify to reap the rewards of Smith’s class-action suit.
Bring on the litigation, people. The more class-action lawsuits there are out there, the better the odds of all us iPhone owners getting a piece of the pie. Albeit a small piece.
[Via: ComputerWorld]