Apple has won its legal battle against music app Musi, which it kicked out of the App Store in 2024 following complaints from both YouTube and the music industry. Musi accused Apple of breach of contract. But Judge Eumi K Lee says Apple was well within its rights to remove Musi from the App Store.
Not only that, but she also sanctioned Musi and its lawyers for incorrectly claiming in an amended legal filing that Apple had admitted it knew evidence provided by the US National Music Publishers Association, which supposedly informed Apple’s decision to axe the app, was in fact false.
“This assertion is factually baseless because Musi has not identified any such admission by Apple”, Lee writes in her judgement. The claim was made after Musi’s lawyers had gone through a two month discovery phase, exchanging documents with Apple. “Claiming Apple ‘admitted’ that it knowingly relied on false evidence conveys that discovery yielded damning evidence”, the judge says, and yet “it did not”.
Apple made various complaints about Musi’s amended filing in this dispute. Lee agrees that that filing was “not the paradigm of candor”, adding it gave “misleading impressions” and “stretched the limits of vigorous advocacy”.
However, it was the specific false statement that Apple had admitted to knowingly relying on false evidence which the judge decided warranted a formal sanction under rule eleven of the US Federal Rules Of Civil Procedure.
Musi sued Apple in a bid to get its app restored to the App Store. The app sources its music from YouTube, rather than by entering into deals with the music industry, a controversial approach that probably breaches YouTube’s terms of service, and likely infringes the music industry’s copyrights.
Record labels and music publishers had been calling for Apple to remove Musi from the App Store for years, but in the end it was a complaint from YouTube that led to the app being evicted. Or at least it was officially speaking. Musi claimed that Apple asked YouTube to reactivate a previously resolved complaint as an excuse to remove the music app, in order to placate the tech giant’s friends in the music industry.
In response, Apple denied “cooking up a scheme” with YouTube to justify removing Musi, not least because no such scheme was required. Under the terms of Apple’s app developer agreements, it’s allowed to remove apps “at any time, with or without cause”.
In her ruling, Lee agrees that the terms of the developer agreement provide Apple with that power. There is “simply no textual basis” in that agreement, she adds, “to construe a limitation on Apple’s right to cease offering an application, as long as Apple provided notice - which it did”.
Musi also argued that Apple had breached an “implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing” by removing its app. Not so, Lee concludes.
Under the “plain language” of the developer agreement, Apple had “the express right to remove the Musi app from the App Store at any time, with or without cause”. And “the covenant of good faith and fair dealing cannot impose an obligation on Apple that contradicts this express term”.
The allegedly ‘false statement’ in the NMPA document provided to Apple said that Musi used YouTube’s API, when in fact it did not.
Apple knew this, Musi argued, because a letter from Sony Music had explained that it had “worked with YouTube to remove API access from Musi, but the app finds ways to access” Sony content on the YouTube platform “through technological means that are more difficult for YouTube to action”.
This was relevant to the legal dispute, Musi said, because YouTube’s complaint to Apple specifically related to supposed violations of its API terms of service. And Musi couldn’t have violated those terms, because it didn’t use the API.
Assuming that Apple knew about the error in the NMPA document because of the Sony letter “requires several inferential steps”, Lee writes in her judgement, and therefore Musi’s theory of wrongdoing on Apple’s part was “tenuous” at best. But it was Musi’s subsequent false claim that Apple had admitted to knowingly relying on fake evidence that resulted in the sanction.