Palm is riding coat tails by relying on Apple's technology and investment in iTunes and iPod to provide a music platform for their Pre product instead of investing in developing their own technology for that purpose.

I wasn't making an argument for illegality, but what they've done is scummy as hell and a downright embarrassment for such a large commercial entity.

iTunes does work with a few other devices. Those devices, such as the Nomad, were licensed for operation with iTunes before Apple came out with the iPod and while Apple was still actively licensing this ability.

Pretending to be an iPod is NOT how you make something compatible. The Pre is not compatible with iTunes in the least. iPods are compatible with iTunes and the Pre is simply pretending to be a specific iPod.

Apple's music, purchased through iTunes, now that it lacks DRM, is fully compatible with many players, as long as they can play AAC. It would make no financial sense for Apple to allow iTunes to access any other music store. I don't think any case can be made legally to try and change this, nor do I think there should be (in case anyone is thinking of some new law because of the current situation). Likewise, I don't believe existing laws would be able to open the iTunes music store up to other applications or other parties. That would be like trying to force Amazon to allow their web site to function for purchases from Barnes and Noble (without giving Amazon a cut).

Apple got to where it is today in the music industry and player market through innovation, hard work, timing (which wasn't an accident) and persistence. If Palm or anyone else wants their products to work with iTunes then approach Apple and work through official channels.

If an unofficial method needed to be implemented, then they should have at least written some program for each platform they support their phone on to communicate with iTunes (or additional music managers), to find out where the music is and then shuttle it themselves to their device. This can be accomplished quite easily on Mac OS with nothing more than AppleScript and in Windows I believe you can accomplish it with Javascript. Or, they could have even just read Apple's plain text XML which details the music location.

Those approaches would have been fine. Pretending to be someone else's device is a cop out and it should be disabled by Palm before it gets remedied by Apple.