The other day I told you that Apple could pay 350 million dollars because of a strategy that prohibited iPod owners from listening to music other than the one purchased from the iTunes Store in their own products.
A trial in this case is in full swing in the USA, and during the testimonies given by Apple employees it was learned that, unfortunately, the American company deleted from the users' iPods the music purchased from the music stores of other companies. Users were not notified about deleting songs from their own iPods, and this is nowhere near as legal as Apple or Steve Jobs believed at the time.
Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), deleted repeatedly music from iPods between 2007 and 2009 without notifying users, the deletions occurring when users synced the products with iTunes in Windows or OS X. At the time of synchronization, iTunes checks the songs present in the iPods and if it detects one bought from a competing store, it displays an error message forcing users to reinstall their iPods' software, effectively erasing all their content and refusing to sync content that wasn't present in its multimedia library.
Apple deleted music that some iPod owners had downloaded from competing music services from 2007 to 2009 without telling users, attorneys for consumers told jurors in a class-action antitrust suit against Apple Wednesday. When a user who had downloaded music from a rival service tried to sync an iPod to the user's iTunes library, Apple would display an error message and instruct the user to restore the factory settings, Coughlin said. When the user restored the settings, the music from rival services would disappear, he said.
Apple argued that the deletion of content from iPods was done as a security measure that was meant to protect users, the entire plea of Apple's lawyers based on the company's attempts to maintain the security of iPods. In reality, we are talking about nothing but an attempt by Apple to force users to buy music only from the iTunes Store, the strategy proving to be extremely profitable in the end, and the compensation that the company will pay will be much lower than the profit won.
