Reuters:

Opening statements are scheduled to begin on Tuesday in an Oakland, California, federal court in the long-running class action, brought by a group of individuals and businesses who purchased iPods between 2006 and 2009. They say a 2006 iTunes update dictated that iTunes music could only be played on iPods, unfairly blocking competing device makers.

Plaintiffs are seeking about $350 million in damages, which would be automatically tripled under antitrust laws. Apple says the software update contained genuine product improvements, and thus should not be found anticompetitive.

I thought that you could always generate and export an MP3 version of any song in your iTunes library, then bring that MP3 over to any player your heart desires. I’ve owned iPods since day one, and I never had an issue bringing my music to other players.

At the heart of this case is RealPlayer and RealAudio, a dominant music streaming player and service back in the day. I sure hope Apple asks the question, how hard was it to pull music from RealAudio and play it on an iPod. I lived in both of these worlds and definitely found the path from iTunes to the outside world much simpler than the other way around.

UPDATE: According to the comments, there was a period when you could only generate an MP3 by burning a CD, then re-ripping the CD into your music library. That does ring a bell. Still, there was a path, albeit one that requires manual labor, the cost of a CD-R, and likely some signal loss.