Even though Jobs is on health leave from Apple Inc, he still must testify in a court of law in an antitrust lawsuit. The plaintiff accuses Apple of preventing competitor’s music files from being played on an iPod.

Jobs, who has been on medical leave since this January is, can only be deposed for two hours, and may only be asked questions about changes made to iTunes, which made it impervious to songs that competitors developed to work with Apple’s iPod, and could only play songs purchased from Apple’s iTunes store.

After the tremendous ascendancy of the iTunes store, another media company known as RealNetworks (also the creator of RealPlayer) created music files that could play on an iPod without iTunes. Apple noticed this, and then revamped their software so that these files would be unable to play on any Apple iPod.

Apple claims that this was only for protection against music piracy, and was very legal. But again, the plaintiff argues that it allowed Apple to have dual monopolies in the markets for MP3 players, and music downloads.

Sheldon Klein, a shareholder in Butzel Long, who is a specialist in antitrust cases, says it’s not too unusual for the CEO of a company to be called in for testifying, but plaintiffs must prove that the CEO is the only one with knowledge of the issues in the case. Sheldon continued to explain, “Usually CEOs don’t have a lot of firsthand knowledge of the things that are in litigation and so if you’re representing the corporation, you’re arguing that this is just to harass the company and the CEO,” he explained. He resumed his explanation by saying, “The magistrate judge very specifically found that Steve Jobs had specific knowledge and limited the subject of the deposition to that narrow scope where he was the best, if not the only, person to be able to testify to it.”

I personally believe that if you buy an iPod, you should have to use the iTunes Store. And with songs at only 99 cents you should be able to afford it. The only way you should get music outside of the iTunes store is using a LEGAL copy of a CD album and importing it to your iTunes library. I have purchased about 40% of my iTunes library from the iTunes Store itself, while the other 60% are songs from the CD’s I have purchased.

What do you guys think?