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Apple Accused of Deleting Songs From iPods Without Users' Knowledge

Posted by timothy on from the not-cricket dept.

SternisheFan writes with this excerpt from a story at AppleInsider that says "During in-court proceedings of Apple's iPod/iTunes antitrust lawsuit on Wednesday, plaintiffs' lawyers claimed Apple surreptitiously deleted songs not purchased through the iTunes Music Store from users' iPods. Attorney Patrick Coughlin, representing a class of individuals and businesses, said Apple intentionally wiped songs downloaded from competing services when users performed a sync with their iTunes library, reports The Wall Street Journal. As explained by the publication, users attempting to sync an iPod with an iTunes library containing music from a rival service, such as RealNetworks, would see an ambiguous error message without prompting them to perform a factory reset. After restoring the device, users would find all non-iTunes music had disappeared. ... It is unclear if iTunes or iPod encountered a legitimate problem, though Coughlin seems to be intimating Apple manufactured the error message as part of a supposed gambit to stop customers from using their iPod to play back music from stores other than iTunes. For its part, Apple said the system was a safety measure installed to protect users."

3 of 250 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds more like technical short-sightedness by boondaburrah · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Having not read the article, this sounds more like the age-old behaviour of auto-synch.

    If auto-synch is left on, of course it erases the entire library and replaces it with your iTunes library. If the non-iTunes purchased songs were loaded onto the iPod from another source, then of course they don't get re-added until you go and add them again from the other source. People have been aware of this at least since my friend and I would load songs onto eachother's 3rd gen ipod with dock connector back in highschool.

  2. Re:Not surprising at all. by greenwow · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How is it unsubstantiated when it is true and has been proven? I rsync my iTunes drive to a remote server every night so I see email reports every day with a list of my music files that Apple deletes. The last delete happened Monday night:

    deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/30 Rock 'n' Roll High School.mp3
    deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/29 Indian Giver.mp3
    deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/28 The KKK Took My Baby Away.mp3
    deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/27 I Just Wanna Have Something To Do.mp3
    deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/26 Chinese Rock.mp3
    deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/25 We Want The Airwaves.mp3 ...

    And so on. Apple decided to delete every Ramones song from iTunes. That is why people hate them. Apple considers us subhuman and has no respect for us or our property.

  3. Re:I knew it! by boristdog · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My neice tried to load a thumb drive of MP3's from my music library into her Ipod a couple years back. Itunes instead reformatted the thumb drive. I thought she just screwed up, so I reloaded the thumb drive from my PC and we tried again. Itunes gave some message about "scanning media" and reformatted the thumb drive again.

    I said then that I would probably never buy another Apple product. I still feel that way.