"Douglas Luftman, an associate general counsel for Palm, said his outfit is not trying to appear to be anything it is not, except for the purpose of interoperability with Itunes."

Yeah, Doug, it's probably the '...except...' that's going to get you in trouble, dontcha think?

Palm Who, these guys still in business ?

If you don't like it invent your own music store !

Neither can Apple claim the high ground. They are using the USB Id, not to correctly identify the device, but to thwart a competitor.

There's a long history of being forced to pretend your some other device for the sake of interoperability. It's the reason that most routers have the ability to 'Clone a MAC address'. ISP's were misusing the unique nature of the MAC address to lock out other devices.

http://nanocr.eu/2009/06/04/palm-pre-usb-hack-confirmed/

It's not like Palm has much of the moral high ground here, since their Pre hack to work with iTunes is basically stealing Apple's USB vendor ID and product ID. Somehow when the USB Implementers Forum set up vendor IDs and product IDs, which companies had to pay for, I doubt the intended use was for products to mis-identify themselves.

http://www.usb.org/developers/vendor/VID_Only_Form_withCCAuth_02042009.pdf