UPDATE, Dec. 5, 3:10 p.m.: The New York Times reports that one of the plaintiffs has been removed from the case. That leaves just one plaintiff, whose standing as a liable plaintiff remains in question.
The antitrust lawsuit being levied against Apple has hit a serious roadblock.
Attorneys for Apple contend that two women named as plaintiffs in the case surrounding the tech giant's iPods did not own devices relevant to the lawsuit, according to BBC News.
Between 2007 and 2009, the lawsuit contends, Apple deliberately deleted songs from competing services from users' iPods. An error message would prompt users to restore their iPods to factory settings without revealing that outside songs would be deleted. Apple maintains that this was a security measure to combat hacking.
"I am concerned that I don't have a plaintiff. That's a problem," the BBC quotes Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers saying during testimony at the end of the trial's third day in Oakland, California, on Thursday.
The $350 million antitrust suit posits that Apple deliberately abused its powerful position in the music hardware industry to ensure that it could crank its product prices as much as it possibly could. There's a window, however: The case only concerns iPods purchased between September 2006 and March 2009.
The problem with the two plaintiffs is that they apparently bought their iPods outside of that specific time frame, according to Apple's attorneys. The serial numbers don't gave them away.
According to BBC, the plaintiffs' lawyer Bonny Sweeney was confirmed that the plaintiff's iPod might not be covered by the lawsuit's timeline, but she said 8 million people were affected. So the case isn't over quite yet.
If the case continues, it's expected that a yet-unseen video of late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs will be presented to the court as evidence against Apple.
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