Who says karma's not real? He who lives by the sword dies by the sword, and the company that lives by the lawsuit gets vaguely annoyed by the lawsuit. In light of Apple's suing frenzy of the past three weeks (in which it's filed no fewer than three suits against people and sites it's accused of leaking trade secrets), is it any wonder that payback has arrived in the form of Apple playing defendant in what is quite possibly the most frivolous lawsuit we've ever had the good fortune to giggle at? Get this, folks: faithful viewer Jason Nieckar informs us that, as reported by Reuters, a California man is suing Apple because, after having purchased songs from the iTunes Music Store, he discovered that he was "'forced' to buy an iPod."

We know exactly what he's talking about; it happened to us, too! Right after we downloaded our first iTMS song, our Mac pulled a gun on us and instructed us to order an iPod from the Apple Store. It even made us pay for-- sob!-- overnight shipping!

Well, okay, not really. (The Mac pulled a knife, not a gun. And we only had to pony up for two-day delivery.) And we know what Mr. Thomas Slattery is getting at; he means that Apple has violated antitrust law by refusing to license its FairPlay Digital Rights Management technology to third party manufacturers looking to make their portable digital music players iTMS-compatible. But claiming that Apple has "leveraged its monopoly in the market for the sale of legal online digital music recordings" is a stretch even Plastic Man wouldn't attempt without months of vigorous training first. After all, did Apple strongarm Tom into buying a song from the iTMS instead of from any of the eight, count 'em, eight WMA-based music services now carrying that insipid "Plays For Sure" trademark? Did Apple block his ability to buy music on CD from the online or brick-and-mortar retailer of his choice and then rip said music into any un-DRMed format he wants?

Heck, let's not even step back that far: Tom says he's an iTMS customer who "'was also forced to purchase an Apple iPod' if he wanted to take his music with him to listen to." Gee, in the universe we inhabit, there are these things called "portable CD players," and they seem to work pretty well for all those poor slobs who can't afford an iPod. Is Tom claiming that Apple somehow threatened him with bodily harm if he so much as thought about burning his iTMS purchases to an audio CD, as iTunes lets the rest of us do without hassle? And did Steve Jobs say he would personally smack around Tom's entire family if Tom burned his iTMS songs to disc and then re-ripped them as open MP3s for playback on just about every digital music player available anywhere, as some of us do routinely specifically for compatibility with non-FairPlay devices? Boy, this guy has it rough.

After all, by Tom's logic (which is apparently that Apple has a monopoly not on music, or even digital downloadable music, but on iTMS music-- help, our brains just melted!), we ought to be able to sue Bungie because if we buy Halo 2, we're "forced" to buy an Xbox to play it on. We can sue Microsoft because Access "forces" us to buy a Wintel system to use it. And we can sue PEZ, because if we buy a pack of PEZ refills, we're "forced" to buy a PEZ dispenser if we want to... um... dispense them. And if you think about it, all of those scenarios are more restrictive than the iTMS situation, since very, very little of the music that Apple sells isn't available from other vendors in other formats compatible with all types of other hardware. Something tells us that ol' Tom's going to sporting a whole extra orifice when the first judge gets through with him.

We could go on and on (and, as regular viewers are all too painfully aware, on and on and on and on and on and on and on), but we'll just leave it at that for now, because our Mac is now threatening to shank us if we don't make it a sandwich and a cup of cocoa. Where's our lawyer when we need him?