14 DAY TRIAL // In the widely publicized class action lawsuit between several iPod owners and Apple, the Judge has remained all but speechless in the face of a very unlikely situation: the plaintiffs have seemingly lost all their privileges in the case.
For those who aren’t in the loop, Apple here is being accused of intentionally sending a firmware update to delete the music on iPods suspected of carrying illegal music. The process through which this happened is vastly more complex, but this is the gist of it, just so everyone is on the same page.
The defendant’s lawyers reportedly sent a letter to the judge overseeing the trial Wednesday night. In the letter, they said that the iPods owned by the plaintiffs had not been, in fact, purchased in the time frame specified in the suit. Therefore, the devices were not relevant to the time period during which the alleged DRM violations occurred.
Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers said, “I am concerned that I don’t have a plaintiff. That’s a problem,” and asked the lawyers of both sides to come up with a solution because time was of the essence.
According to the NY Times report, Judge Gonzales Rogers said she would help speed up the research in this matter, but advised both sides to work diligently to produce new evidence to sustain the plaintiffs case, otherwise the suit could be stalled indefinitely or even halted altogether.
