Apple deleted songs from customers’ iPods
By Dan Simon @CNNTech December 4, 2014: 5:16 PM ET
http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/04/technology/apple-ipod-trial/index.html
Between 2007 and 2009, Apple routinely deleted music off of some customers’ iPods without telling them.
That’s according to an attorney representing plaintiffs in a class-action trial taking place this week. A class of 8 million iPod owners argue that Apple abused its monopoly power in the music industry to force out competition.
When iPod customers downloaded music from iTunes rivals, Apple (AAPL, Tech30) would force customers to reset their iPods, the attorney said. When the iPod was restored, the music they downloaded from competitors’ music stores would no longer be on their iPods.
Apple claims that the measures were taken to protect its contracts with the record labels...
Sorry, you and this article are legally wrong. Apple was under contract to do what they did and was required to delete the music.
Apple routinely informed iPod users that unauthorized and unsupported Digital Rights Managed (DRM) songs may not be retained after an update. Apple was constrained heavily by the Millennium Copy Right Act of 1998 under which DRM was empowered. The customers were warned that there were no guarantees that songs purchased from other vendors who used a different DRM system were not and could not be supported.
The only ones that were "deleted" were those that used hacked means to get their songs on the iPad by spoofing the DRM the music companies REQUIRED for Apple to be able to sell their music and taking advantage of a vulnerability in Apple's security to add their own unauthorized DRM to iTunes and the iPod which put Apple's contracts in jeopardy. If Apple did not close those vulnerabilities within a specified time frame, the music publishers would pull their music from the iTunes stores. Apple HAD to patch the vulnerabilities which, when patched caused the spoofed music to no longer work.
The only way that Realnetwork's music got onto an iPod in the first place was by breaking Apple's DRM security by hacking, which could have been considered, essentially, a Federal criminal act. Apple was required by their contract to fix any vulnerabilities found in the DRM within 30 days or the music would be pulled from their stores by the big four music publishers which published 80% of the music.
When Apple closed the vulnerabilities in iPod's OS 7.0 through 7.4 in 2007 thru 2009, RealNetworks repeated hacks stopped working. At which point the RealNetwork DRM prevented the music from playing on the iPod because the hack no longer worked. It was Real's DRM that stopped the music from running. Playlists would not move on from the Real songs. . . and the iPod froze. The only fix, since the update overwrote the hack that enabled the Real DRM, was to restore the iPod to factory condition and resync the user's music, which without the hack, could not load the DRMed RealNetwork music which restored all non-DRM MP3s, purchased iTunes DRM music and ripped music and re-estabished functionality. The only thing missing would be the hacked music. Apple did not delete the music although the result was essentially the same.
The bar that Apple has to go over to show they did not act criminally in this trial is that the updates were not just to prevent competition, but also for other legal purposes and to provide updates to their software. That is easily done as each update included major changes to the software.