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Apple Accused of Deleting Songs From iPods Without Users' Knowledge
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."
THAT is why many people avoid Apple like the plague. They've lost their lead, had their fun and are now fighting fowl.
"You didn't buy it from us, you must have stolen it."
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I have been making backups of my iTunes library for years because a long time ago I noticed that a large number of my songs had just gone missing. I never heard anything about it so thought it was just something I had done wrong.
"Your honor, it is true that we deleted the songs, but one of them was from Justin Bieber, we thought that the public good..."
- "Why didn't you tell us earlier? Case Dismissed."
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
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.
From what I can tell, what's being claimed isn't that Apple is specifically wiping the files, but rather that: 1) users are told to factory-reset their device; and 2) this wipes all files; except that 3) after factory reset, iTunes restores the iTunes-purchased files from Apple.
#2 and #3 don't seem particularly nefarious on their own. You'd expect a factory reset to wipe the device, and you'd expect a cloud service like iTunes to support restoring your purchases from (and only from) that service. So what it seems to boil down to is: was situation #1 popping up nefariously, i.e. Apple is purposely triggering an unnecessary "please factory reset your device" request even when there is nothing wrong with the device and no need to factory-reset it? And furthermore, that Apple is doing this based on detecting competitors' services on the device? That seems... surprisingly blatant if true.
Another possibility, which Apple seems to be hinting at, is that some kind of "tamper-detection" DRM is setting off reset-your-device false positives.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This shouldn't surprise you. ITunes, especially on Windows, was a nightmare to manage in parallel with any other music software. Odds are this was just a happy accident that AAPL just didn't do anything to fix.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
Were the deleted songs DRM'ed by RealNetworks? (these guys still existed?)
I'm pretty sure that regular MP3 files were not deleted, so it's not really a case of "not bought here", remember that Apple was under a lot of legal obligations by the music labels regarding FairPlay DRM at the time.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
knowledge. Must be because they are repentant for deleting users' music earlier.
Kind of funny how most of the articles bury (if they even mention it at all) Real (buffering) Network's connection. To put everything in context, The iPod could play unprotected mp3s, aacs, and wavs. They could also play FairPlay DRM files purchased through the iTunes store. Real (buffering) Networks wanted to sell music that could play on iPods but they also wanted their DRM.
Fuck you DRM, and fuck you Real (buffering) Networks. Good riddance to both of you.
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That's what happens when you reliquish control of your digital life for the sake of the superficial convenience of not having to maintain your own hardware and perform your own backups: when the third party you entrust your data to decides you can't have it anymore, all you can do is bitch and moan and ask politely to get back what's rightfully yours. But *you* don't decide: your comfortable and convenient digital jailer does.
At the end of the day, Apple customers only have themselves to blame for what Apple does to them. And the same goes for Google, Microsoft and all the others, when they decide to shaft their own userbase without warning.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Only 3 of my albums were bought on iTune, yet i've *never* had anything deleted in the 10 or so years I've used ipods and iphones.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Considering both Apple and Amazon sell unprotected music and have for almost a decade now, and they have record sales every year, I'd say the fear is overblown. Buying a song for .99 is convenient compared to piracy.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
The only thing I can figure is that Apple's throwing an error when the iTunes_Control library on the device doesn't match what the sync DB managed by iTunes says should be there. This indicates data corruption, whether it be by gremlins, failed SSD write, or RealNetworks only partially implementing the (closed) sync specification. Since Apple doesn't throw this error when iCloud updates the iTunes_Control library, this means that there exists a way to sync from multiple sources and still not get the error -- which points to a problem with how the third party is doing it. If they want to be able to use the device without getting these errors at all, just create a Real_Control directory and use a RealPod app to play its contents. For pure iPods with no App capabilities, this isn't going to work, and they'll need to add their tracks via iTunes, or fully implement the closed sync specs.
Those closed specs are the one part of Real et al's argument that makes sense -- if Apple is using such a mechanism, it would make sense to make those specs open so that anyone can write software to communicate with the iOS iTunes_Control library. But there's nothing saying they have to.
Not to mention that iTunes itself provides this feature. "Rip. Mix. Burn," anyone? This whole story sounds like ambulance-chaser bullshit.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
and removed the songs with bogus FairPlay from people's devices, because they would no longer work.
See that's the thing, it's MY filesystem on MY device.
If the files exploited a hole in the DRM, then the DRM was patched and the files no longer work... fine, the files don't work, but you can't delete my files on my device .
Face it, Apple screwed the pooch and got called out on it. Hopefully they get a sharp smack in the nose with a newspaper, learn from the past and don't do stupid shit like this again, and everyone can move on.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
The problem in this case is that Real is trying to get their reverse engineered version of Apple's FairPlay DRM to work. The reason their music files can't be added through iTunes is because iTunes closed the loopholes that Real used in order to essentially clone the functionality of Apple's DRM-scheme. If the music files in question were DRM-free, this issue wouldn't exist. However, because they sold a bunch of music and Apple didn't want to use Real's DRM scheme, Real tried to reverse engineer FairPlay, which worked for a while until Apple fixed the loopholes and suddenly Real was left back at square one, trying to sell DRM-encumbered music that couldn't be played on most devices.
Real is just trying to sue to get some money because they're just a slowly dying company at this point. They've just slowly been bleeding money and eventually will end up declaring bankruptcy or selling their brand name, though I'm not really sure whey anyone would want it.
How can you be such a corporate apologist?! Apple in no place advertised that the only DRM music that could be played on iPods was Fairplay music, this screwed over customers, it was a shit thing to do but you go out and defend and praise Apple for it. "Oh yes thank you master for fucking me over Ill tell everybody how good it was, may I have another?"
They may not have put up giant posters proclaiming that the only DRMed music that you could play on an iPod was FairPlay, but it's not exactly like it was some kind of secret, either.
I'm not saying I don't feel bad for the people who honestly didn't know how these things worked who bought music from RealNetworks, then had their music stop working when Apple fixed the loophole. I can imagine how frustrating that would have been.
But that doesn't mean that Apple is at fault for fixing bugs in their code. I suppose you could blame them for having the bugs in the first place, but I think that's kind of a "let he who is without sin" situation to get into. And the decision not to license FairPlay, or implement any of the dizzying array of competing music DRM schemes that existed at the time, is one that can be legitimately questioned by reasonable people, but I don't think that makes it by any stretch of the imagination Obviously Wrong.
However, it seems to me that you've got an axe to grind against Apple specifically, and possibly against corporations in general, and aren't actually interested in reasoned discourse. (The first clue was leading with an insult, by the way. Ad hominem attacks are never a good sign.)
Either way, I don't see your objection as having any serious merit.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
if you want to have total control over your device and manage every single configuration and file copy by hand...you don't buy an iPod.
Or any Apple products.
So, then, the other way around: OS X's filesystem (it is HFS, right?) on Windows. Because I've still never seen iTunes try to format a thumbdrive, but I've definitely seen Windows offer to format a thumbdrive it doesn't recognize the filesystem on.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
"... Coughlin explained the procedure as to which Apple employed to remove songs from users’ iPods. The vaguely duplicitous act was executed by Apple when iPod users would attempt to sync their iPod with iTunes after downloading music from rival music services. The user would be instructed by an error message instructing it to restore the iPod to its factory setting. Once the user synced their iPod with iTunes after restoring their iPod to its factory settings, the non-Apple music files music would gone.
Apple defends its action and claims it was just worried its users were at the hands of hackers. Apple’s security director Augustin Farrugia informed the court that hackers “DVD John” and “Requiem” were potential threats to users and thus removed non-Apple music files from iPods. Farrugia reasons Apple did not inform users of the deletion because the company does not want to “confuse users” with “too much information.” ....
http://www.digitaltrends.com/m...