OAKLAND, Calif. — Legendary Apple CEO Steve Jobs had seven words for a subordinate when he learned that a rival company was about to introduce a program that would let music fans buy songs anywhere and play them on Apple’s iPod devices.
“We may need to change things here,” Jobs said in a terse, 2005 e-mail that was shown to jurors in federal court Tuesday, on the opening day of trial in a billion-dollar antitrust lawsuit that accuses Apple Inc. of using unfair tactics to maintain its dominance in the digital music business.
Attorneys for an estimated 8 million consumers and iPod resellers say Jobs’ e-mail spurred an internal campaign to keep Apple’s popular iPods free of music that wasn’t purchased from Apple’s own iTunes store.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Patrick Coughlin also showed jurors a 2003 e-mail from Jobs, written about the launch of another competitor’s online music store, which said, “We need to make sure that when Music Match launches” “they cannot use iPod.”
