It never happened to me but this story is very weird: According to the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal and other music medias, Apple is being sued for allegedly removing from iPods, songs that were purchased on rival companies’ download services! You mean like Amazon?? I still have all my Amazon downloads so I am not sure I understand why it happened to some people but this is what they claim…
Between 2007 and 2009, an Apple software would give ‘an error message when an iPod would attempt to sync with a music library containing songs bought on other music download programs’, then you would have to restore the iPod to factory settings and the songs from these other services would be deleted. And people would lose the money spent on the songs? Not really to my understanding, but this is the reason used by the plaintiffs to seek $350 million in damages, a sum that could even get bigger if Apple is found in violation of antitrust laws.
‘You guys decided to give them the worst possible experience and blow up” users’ music collections’, said attorney Patrick Coughlin, speaking in U.S. District Court in Oakland. In response, Apple security director Augustin Farrugia said that Apple deleted the files ‘out of precautions against hackers’, as ‘corrupted music files from non-Apple services were seen as a potential gateway for hackers to access users’ data and systems.’ … ‘Apple products would not be as good or secure if third parties can come into the system.’
That sounds like a bunch of cover-ups of course, and one evidence from the trial is in fact a few emails that Steve Jobs sent to an employee ‘We may need to change things here,’ (2005) and ‘We need to make sure that when Music Match launches … they cannot use iPod.’ (2003)… sure but where is the entire email, this seems so vague, it could be about anything? Apple stopped using the software in 2009.
This looks bad for Apple but I repeat, it never happened to me and I have downloaded lots of songs from other sources, some for free (legally and a few illegally!) and never had a problem and I was certainly using iPods during that time. And reading the comments here and there, I am not the only one.
But there is something I don’t understand in all this: restoring the iPod to factory settings would certainly erase the songs on the iPods but the songs are still in your iTunes library, right? That’s where they go when you download them from Amazon or other sources, and the report doesn’t say they were deleted from the library so where is the problem?? I was surprised to see this story reprinted everywhere without the right questions asked! I am not sure there is a case here.
