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Plaintiff Stacie Somers alleges that by failing to support WMA while dominating the markets for digital players and music downloads Apple is restricting consumer choice.

"Apple has engaged in tying and monopolising behaviour, placing unneeded and unjustifiable technological restrictions on its most popular products in an

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effort to restrict consumer choice, and to restrain what little remains of its competition in the digital music markets," the lawsuit claims.

"Apple's iPod is alone among mass-market Digital Music Players in not supporting the WMA format," it adds.

The lawsuit claims that licensing WMA would add around 2p to the cost of an iPod. But it alleges that Apple has deliberately designed the iPod to be incompatible with the Microsoft format.

"Apple, however, deliberately designed the iPod's software so that it would only play a single protected digital format, Apple's FairPlay-modified AAC format," the lawsuit claims, inaccurately, since AAC is not an Apple format.

"Deliberately disabling a desirable feature of a computer product is known as 'crippling' a product, and software that does this is known as 'crippleware'," the suit continues.

Apple does not comment on ongoing litigation.