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."

Comments

Not surprising at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

THAT is why many people avoid Apple like the plague. They've lost their lead, had their fun and are now fighting fowl.

Re:Not surprising at all.

[dgatwood]

They're engaged in competition with avians? Neat. I'd pay to see that.

Re:Not surprising at all.

[greenwow]

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.

Re:Not surprising at all.

[legojenn]

If it's any consolation, you really only need one Ramones song. They're all the same anyhow.

home taping is killing music

[Thud457]

"You didn't buy it from us, you must have stolen it."

and the defense attorney gose like:

[marcello_dl]

"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."

Sounds more like technical short-sightedness

[boondaburrah]

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.

Re:Sounds more like technical short-sightedness

[jo_ham]

If auto-synch is left on, of course it erases the entire library and replaces it with your iTunes library.

Could you explain the logic of this to me? Using phrases like "of course" seems erroneous to me. If I was developing an application and all I had in mind was the end user, I would handle a sync just like I would handle any other sync: merge the two things you're syncing. When you sync your phone with your computer, does it delete everything and add only new content? No. It 'syncs' which should me a node A gets info from node B and vice versa. No deleting.

The iPod sync doesn't work that way. The library on the iPod is a mirror of the one on the computer. The computer is the master device, and if you make changes to the library on the iPod, they will not be kept unless they are also made on the master library.

When the iPod is synced, the master library is what is used to determine what is on there - it's purely a mirror of the computer, not a two way sync/merge. After the release of the iPhone (and other touchscreen iDevices) the option to consolidate tracks you had downloaded elsewhere was added as part of the sync process, but in the early days when it was designed to be used with a single master library when in full auto mode, it did not do this - it simply told you that it would delete the tracks if you selected "yes, delete the tracks and sync".

Where this would trip people up is if they would load music onto their iPod manually (manual control was always an option) on one computer, then later connected it up to a computer that had automatic sync set up (iTunes warns you if it will delete files, but who reads dialog boxes, eh?), and thus any changes made to the iPod are then lost.

Adding those "third party" tracks to iTunes and syncing them to the iPod worked as it always did, or if you wanted to run with multiple different iTunes libraries you just turned off the automatic sync and just manually controlled what iTunes would copy to your iPod.

Of course, that doesn't make for very click-baity headlines or nonsense lawsuits.

is the claim they're triggering a fake reset need?

[Trepidity]

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.

lol

[slashdice]

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.

Re:lol

[PRMan]

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.

Re:That's the cloud for you

[jo_ham]

No, it's what happens if you leave the sync settings on auto and ignore the "there are files on this device that are not in your library, these will be deleted? Continue? [Cancel Sync] [Continue Sync]" dialog box.

Set the iPod to manual (or don't factory reset it without a backup) and the click bait goes away.

This entire thing boiled down to "I factory reset something and didn't have a backup. Wah! Apple deleted my stuff!"

What would you say to someone who formatted their device without a backup, expecting everything to still be on it afterwards?

Re:I knew it!

[boristdog]

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.

Re:Get the facts first

[chmod a x mojo]

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.