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

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: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.