Northern California District Judge James Ware rejected arguments for dismissal in a class-action case surrounding Apple and AT&T's exclusivity deal for the iPhone.

The lawsuit alleges Apple unfairly maintains exclusivity with AT&T, preventing owners from unlocking and jailbreaking their handsets. It also argues that both companies disguised some post-sale costs of ownership.

Ware dismissed Apple's and AT&T's requests for dismissal -- a normal, routine part of the lawsuit process -- ruling they either weren't lawfully arguable or they didn't address the nature of the lawsuit.

Apple said that since customers were still under the terms of their two-year contract, they couldn't legally argue the status of that contract: Ware said wasn't true. The company also said that they have since added support for third-party applications, but Ware said that wasn't the whole story, since Apple knowingly limits access to certain areas where it has a "financial interest."

All parties in the case will next meet November 17, where the court will try to find out more information about the nature of the deal between Apple and AT&T, including the exact duration of their exclusivity agreement.

[Via Macsimum News and AppleInsider.]

I can’t say I didn’t expect this to happen. Of course, anything could occur. Google could have played its cards stiff all the way though. But really, what interest would the company or its partner-to-be have in instituting their pre-agreed arrangement without the official okay or approval of the U.S. Department of Justice? The terms wouldn’t bring phenomenal amounts of cash to either entity, anyway, so they’re just going to wait this one out. A logical last-minute position to take, this seems to be.

According to Kara Swisher of AllThingsD’s BoomTown blog, who has been avidly and incessantly following movements made by various parties in the search world for quite some time, Google spent some of its lobbying power this past week, which has in the past few years has purportedly grown a great deal in strength and influence, to assuage regulators’ concerns about the ad play. But a letter released Thursday by the office of Senator Herb Kohl, chairman of the Antitrust Subcommittee, and addressed to Assistant Attorney General Thomas Barnett, hints very plainly at the company’s non-success at forward motion. In Kohl’s words:

While we have conducted a careful review of this transaction, we do not have the benefit of the confidential business information supplied by the companies to the Department nor the economic models necessary to predict consumer and advertiser behavior. Determining the competitive effects of this transaction, moreover, requires us to predict the future of a young and dynamic market. Nonetheless, we conclude that important competition issues are raised by this transaction. Should the amount of advertising outsourced by Yahoo to Google grow significantly, we believe the threat to competition will also increase.

Recognizing the nascent and fast-changing nature of this marketplace, we encourage the Department to continue to monitor the state of competition in this industry, whatever the outcome of its current investigation. If, over time, you determine that Google is gaining a dominant market position as a result of the Google-Yahoo agreement, then we would encourage the Justice Department to intervene to protect competition. Even should you conclude at present that this deal is not contrary to antitrust law, the Department must be sure that this deal never in the future crosses the line into an unacceptable, anti-competitive collaboration among competitors which will harm consumers and advertisers.

Statements made by executives at Google and Yahoo over the matter in the last month or two have certainly gone to reasonable lengths in making the technical case for their agreement. And Web-based discourse has not been short of arguments for and against the deal. Yet, those against seem to have spoken more loudly, and in greater numbers. Having groups like the World Association of Newspapers, a Paris-based body, and the Association of National Advertisers, a collection of some 400 marketers, big and small, can most definitely help to raise the profile of topic as contentious as this. Indeed, the more attention is paid, the less that the charmers of Mountain View and Sunnyvale can really finagle their way to an “easy” green light.

And having it pass through DOJ inspection without much trouble might have been what the companies were expecting. Perhaps because the financial benefit for one or both companies isn’t so immense. And because there’s that non-exclusive tag they have been attaching to most every public portrayal they make about the agreement. Alternatively, some observers have taken the line that Yahoo-Google was never meant to be, and that it was just to shake the head of Microsoft. A strategy of convenience. Yahoo is naturally a competitor to Google, but there’s a lesser-of-two-evils element to consider. “Let’s be frenemies for the time being,” is the general idea. I walk somewhere down the middle with regard to these premises. Both help paint the picture, I think.

Either way, Google and Yahoo have decided to do what was pretty much unavoidable, given the heat of the moment. It’s difficult to predict where this new October semi-surprise (if you can call it that) will go, but regulators heightened concern over potential abuse. Hence these last few weeks of intensified troubles. You might loosely say Google and Yahoo’s real estate venture has been put on hold due to broader turmoil in the housing market. Is this a case of wrong place, wrong time?

(Image credit (top): Welsh Highland Heritage)

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Company

JamsBio

20-Word Description

A new online social community where people connect with each other by sharing the music and moments that shape their lives.

CEO’s Pitch

Music is a part of everyone’s life, helps to define us and has power to unite us. This is the inspiration behind JamsBio.

JamsBio offers a rich platform on top of a database of over 5 million songs to:

- Share music memories

- Review albums, songs and concerts

- Dedicate music to someone special

- Create and debate Top-5 music lists

- Play games that test your music knowledge

- Offer original columns, podcasts, and articles from the fan’s perspective

Mashable’s Take

JamsBio looks and smells just like another social music sharing service at first, but a look under the covers reveals something different, which is refreshing these days. Yes, you can share music on the site but there’s more to it than that. Think of it more as a musical blog platform mixed with a music review service.

You can express your thoughts and feeling with a post about music in three different ways:

1. Memory - Share what you think about a specific song, when and where you heard it

2. Music Review - Write a review of a song, album or artist.

3. Concert Review - Review the actual live performance that you attended.

Here’s a music Review I did about a song from Foreigner. Notice how it includes your rating, review and even an embedded player that allows the reader to listen to the track:

There are several fun things to do on the service, such as games. For example, there’s SongBlitz which is like Name That Tune, where you try to guess the name of the song and artist. There’s also JamsMatch where you try to match classic album covers with the right artists. There’s a leaderboard that tracks all players and results.

They have a Facebook app called Memory Explorer that lets you show your latest JamsBio memories in your Facebook profile, as well as widgets that you can embed on your other social networking profiles, blogs or websites.

Another fun area is the Top 5 lists feature where members share their favorite five songs, artists or albums in countless categories. This can generate a great deal of debate and arguments, which is cool. Just as in music posts, the songs in your list can be played right from there. As with just about everything else on the site, you can easily embed your list as a widget or share it on other social networks with friends.

JamsBio does offer a different way to express yourself through your musical tastes. They present many interesting tools to accumplish this too. Their MusicFinder database seems to do a good job finding tracks. They claim that their database contains millions of songs which might be true judging from the results of all the searches that I conducted, including very rare and obscure tunes and artists. I know the last thing any of us need is yet another social music sharing site, but this one serves up an original soundtrack worth a listen and a look.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

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