El Reg reports
Apple has prevailed in an almost decade-long antitrust legal battle over the way its iPod gadgets handled music not obtained through iTunes.
A federal jury in Oakland, California, took just four hours to clear the iThings maker of wrongdoing--and tossed out calls for a $351[M] compensation package for eight million owners of late-2000s iPods. That figure could have been tripled if the iPhone giant had lost its fight.
Apple was accused in a class-action lawsuit of designing its software to remove music and other files from iPods that weren't purchased or ripped via iTunes--but the eight-person jury decided that mechanism was a legit feature.
[...]It was argued that Apple had deliberately set up iTunes to report iPods as damaged if they stored music that, essentially, wasn't sanctioned by Apple: if alien files were found by the software, users were told to restore their devices to factory settings, effectively wiping songs not purchased from or ripped from CD by iTunes.
Apple countered that it was only preventing iPods from being hacked or damaged by third-party data. The company said the protections were implemented to prevent people from listening to pirated music--a claim the jury upheld.
Related:
Apple Deleted Rivals' Songs from Users' iPods - Class-Action Suit
Apple's Intentional iPod Lock-in Efforts - Engineer Testifies in Court
Related Stories
A WSJ story details how Apple, in 2007-2009, deleted music from users' iPods if it hadn't been downloaded from their own service
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.
“You guys decided to give them the worst possible experience and blow up a user’s music library", attorney Patrick Coughlin said in U.S. District Court in Oakland, Calif. 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 directed the system “not to tell users the problem,” Coughlin said.
To plaintiffs in the case, the move showed how Apple had stifled competition for music players and downloads. They are seeking $350 million in damages in the decade-old suit, claiming Apple’s actions forced them to pay more for iPods. The damages could be tripled under antitrust laws.
Apple contends the moves were legitimate security measures. Apple security director Augustin Farrugia testified that Apple did not offer a more detailed explanation because, “We don’t need to give users too much information,” and “We don’t want to confuse users.”
Ex-Apple engineer Rod Schultz wrote a paper in 2012 citing “a secret war” that Apple fought with iTunes competitors. In the paper, he wrote, “Apple was locking the majority of music downloads to its devices".
The engineer was subpoenaed to show that Apple tries to suppress rivals to iTunes and iPods. The court submission argues that Apple’s anti-competitive actions drove up the prices for iPods from 2006 to 2009 and plaintiffs are seeking $350 million in damages, which could be tripled under antitrust laws.
The Wall Street Journal notes that 'Outside the courtroom Schultz said the early work of his former team reflected the digital-music market’s need for copyright protections of songs. Later, though, he said it created “market dominance” for the iPod. Schultz left Apple in 2008.'
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @03:14AM
Last time i let itunes infect my music collection ( only 12. Months ago), there was still trouble mixing in other mp3/4 with an itunes purchased set. Never got it to recognise cd content ripped outside itunes itself. Dumped it quickly anyway, don't like the way most music libraries try to organise my files.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday December 18 2014, @02:54PM
Where are you getting this music? My dad's been using iTunes for years, and has never purchased a single track from Apple. He's got over 60 gigs of music and he's never had a problem with any of it. Never had a problem recognizing ripped CDs or pirated files or files purchased through third parties like Amazon....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @05:29PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @03:36AM
My understanding of this case is that Apple was (and still is) actively anti-competitive, but since the iTunes release contained new features in addition to the anti-competitive code Apple is not guilty.
I'm not really surprised. Once the big players started selling users expensive hardware, while simultaneously preventing the users from using their property, their way it was all down hill.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Tork on Thursday December 18 2014, @04:21AM
My understanding of this case is that Apple was (and still is) actively anti-competitive, but since the iTunes release contained new features in addition to the anti-competitive code Apple is not guilty.
Apple isn't guilty because Real was trying to mimic their DRM and failed at it. Basically Apple was dumping broken files. Apple is arrogant, but Real did this one to themselves.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @04:49AM
That is an exceptionalli kind characterization. The files were only 'broken' because the spec was needlessly baroque. They were not broken in a way that interfered with the functions of cataloguing or playback. No other functionality is of value to the device owner, so if Apple is enforcing that, just who are they helping by doing so?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @05:28AM
The files being broken is how Apple was able to detect them. Just because they were able to play back at the time doesn't mean a future firmware update wouldn't break it.
There are plenty of reasons to rag on Apple, this isn't one of them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @02:36PM
The files being broken is how Apple was able to detect them. Just because they were able to play back at the time doesn't mean a future firmware update wouldn't break it.
That is just as disingenuous as Tork's defense. They were only 'broken' in a way that that doesn't matter to the user. If any future update coincidentally couldn't handle them for functional reasons, then cross that bridge when it happens. After all, storage errors happen all the time anyway, gamma rays flip bits on occasion, so the code has to handle corrupt files anyway.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday December 18 2014, @05:32PM
And, no, varying from the spec is not the same as bit errors. That's like saying you can write a JPEG decoder that has error-checking that is so good it'll read PNGs.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @06:41PM
The iPod would get a firmware update through iTunes, at which point that "crossing the bridge" would not be done on a battery powered device with minimal memory and cpu power but on the computer running iTunes.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday December 18 2014, @06:47PM
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 19 2014, @03:10PM
The assumptions you base your apologia on are kind of amazing. It is a level of delusion, a slanting of half-truths to such an extreme, that the only reasonable explanation is that you have some sort of hang-up that causes you to defend such blatantly anti-customer behavior.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday December 19 2014, @04:11PM
The assumptions you base your apologia on are kind of amazing.
Lol.
...the only reasonable explanation is that you have some sort of hang-up that causes you to defend such blatantly anti-customer behavior.
The hang-up that I have is that I read about it. If you had, you could have had a rebuttal instead of playing the shill card.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @04:22AM
There is no way in hell any US court will find against Apple in any case that matters. They pretty much own politicians and the judiciary there.
It's a shame, because they've become a hugely damaging company, and are getting worse now that they realize controls won't be applied to them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @03:43AM
> The company said the protections were implemented to prevent people from listening to pirated music--a claim the jury upheld.
How convenient that "pirated music" looks just like 3rd party music. Good thing Apple was there to save people from committing felonies. Anything not explicitly permitted is forbidden.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tibman on Thursday December 18 2014, @02:43PM
In early 2000's i still bought and ripped CDs. My first ipod was a white brick, black & white screen, and actual spinning drive. ITunes had no idea what was legit music and what wasn't. It just indexed and uploaded it. Winamp and xmms had decent plugins for adding music to the ipod. The only issue was when letting iTunes update the ipod after you added songs with non-itunes software. It just deleted every song that iTunes didn't add. Complete piece of crap. Apple deleting that music had nothing to do with piracy. It had everything to do with forcing users to only use iTunes to manage and upload music to their ipod. It can be easily proved to loading legally purchased mp3s with alternative software. Such a garbage court decision.
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(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Thursday December 18 2014, @04:02AM
Then Apple can STFUADIAF and join the Sony list of companies I won't do business with. It's MY device when I exchange MY money to get it in MY hands. No matter the source, if I put data someplace, it should stay until I take it away.
Odd how Apple can get away with this, but if any anti-virus software did this they'd see an instant drop off in market share.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday December 18 2014, @04:09AM
If you've waited this long to put Apple on that list you haven't been paying attention. They're far worse and more dangerous than Sony *ever* was, and they've been that way for about seven years.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday December 18 2014, @06:11AM
I wonder how many of the Jury had iPhones in their pockets.
This Jury would let Apple off the hook for deleting their music to protect them from the risk of listening (shiver) Pirated Music.
What's next, jurys letting car thieves off, with thanks, for protecting us from hurting ourselves in our own vehicles?
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(Score: 2) by rts008 on Thursday December 18 2014, @04:39AM
This is why I have never been interested in any Apple device.
RMS's rants don't sound quite so crazy now, do they?
I hate being protected from myself. I want the freedom to explore, poke around inside, try ideas(hack...old school meaning), and yes, even to drestroy my own stuff on a whim.
I have learned more with this approach than all of my education/training has taught me.
And seemingly every manufacturer out there increasingly tries to hinder my enjoyment and education.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday December 18 2014, @05:41AM
What was the name of that character in the first "Matrix" movie, who when the court was about to unplug her ("Switch"?), said: "Not like this, not like this."
Not sure who to hate more, the RIAA with their insistence on, well, serfdom, or the Apple, with their liberation from RIAA serfdom by means of iTunes serfdom. I have never partaken of either. I am a free ancient greek, I predate your silly intellectual property laws. Heck, in my day, there was very little intelligence! But the idea that it would be minimized, controlled, only doled out to those who could pay! Heresy!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @05:47AM
Apple was once a small company. They had to get customers from the big boys that had lots of customers and did not mind losing them.
Apple is now a big company. There will be other small companies who have to get customers, and Apple is paving the way for their customers to jump ship.
Bosses think differently from workingfolk.
One thing workingfolk know is they are guaranteed to get fired if they tell the boss they won't do something then get into the boss's office and throw his files away.
When one gets promoted too high, they often forget that. Their job seems secured by who they know, not what they do.
Only large overfinanced companies have the luxury of retaining folks who think that rubbing their customers the wrong way is good for business.
It takes two people to destroy a corporation... one actually does the deed, while the other keeps him on the payroll.
The trick is to find the man who will hire you to trash his firm.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday December 18 2014, @03:02PM
It's not *really* about pirated music. Pirated music works just fine on the iPod. Unless it's pirated *DRMed* music. It's the DRM that made Apple delete the tracks, and only because the DRM was designed to look like broken Apple DRM.
I mean Apple is an awful company, and they maybe shouldn't have done this, but all they were trying to do was delete corrupted (and possibly infected) data. Personally I wouldn't want any app that does that, tell me what files are corrupted and I'll go verify and repair or delete them myself. But someone like my father is going to sit there going "why the hell are you keeping these files around if you say they're broken? You know where they are, I don't, now go get rid of them."
(Score: 2) by everdred on Thursday December 18 2014, @11:44PM
> But someone like my father is going to sit there going "why the hell are you keeping these files around if you say they're broken? You know where they are, I don't, now go get rid of them."
In your example, remember that these are files that your father paid for, which play fine on his computer. Wouldn't he (rightly) assume that the problem is with the iPod ("the music player") that won't play his music?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday December 19 2014, @02:02PM
Not really. He doesn't listen to music on his computer. As far as he's concerned, if iTunes says it's broken, then it's broken. This isn't hypothetical either, he's encountered "corrupted" files in the past, and the solution he accepted was 'delete those files from the library'. The files may or may not still be on his computer to this day, but he doesn't know or care. Nor do I for that matter -- unless he's running out of disk space it's a non-issue.
The fact that the people paid for these songs is a good point, but that's not why this feature was implemented. If you've got software designed to process text files and you feed it an executable, do you expect it to run the executable through as though nothing's wrong? Or do you expect it to do some sanity checks and treat the executable as corrupted?
Real attempted to hack Apple's DRM. They failed. iTunes treated their files *exactly* as Real had intended -- it treated them as though they were Apple tracks. This is just another lesson in the hidden dangers of DRM. Also probably worth nothing that Real asked Apple for permission to copy their DRM, Apple refused, and Real went ahead and did it anyway. If you try to mimic someone else's proprietary format without permission in order to force their software to use your data, you're taking some serious risks because you don't have any control over what that software does or how it might change. That's just common sense. The lawsuit ought to be against Real for making promises to their customers that they should have been fully aware they couldn't keep.
And just to be clear, if there's any evidence at all that Apple made these changes intentionally to nuke music purchased from Real, that would be a very different situation. But that does not appear to be the case.
(Score: 1) by radu on Thursday December 18 2014, @09:22AM
I wonder how comes they have to tell you that but they don't have to print warnings like:
WARNING! This device cannot be used to play YOUR music. This is for playing only what APPLE CORP INC TM R is allowing you to at APPLE's own convenient time and in APPLE's own convenient way, volume, duration etc. APPLE can and will change any of the previous automatically whenever it wants with forced updates. This is for your own protection! By buying any APPLE hardware you agree to APPLE RULES V1.0 and any subsequent version.
(Score: 3, Informative) by theluggage on Thursday December 18 2014, @10:45AM
I wonder how comes they have to tell you that but they don't have to print warnings like: WARNING! This device cannot be used to play YOUR music.
Er... because it isn't true?
iPods/pads/phones are perfectly happy playing unprotected MP3 files - if not, I must be hallucinating the contents of my (totally un-hacked) iPod and iPad, not one note of which was bought from Apple.
You wouldn't guess it given the spin put on all these articles, but the issue isn't about Apple blocking third-party music, its about Apple blocking third-party DRM. If "your" music won't play on an iPod its because someone else has already decided that its not "your" music. All people had to do to compete with Apple was to sell DRM-free music (which, happily, is now the norm - if only that common sense would pass on to books and video).
(Score: 1) by radu on Thursday December 18 2014, @11:17AM
Maybe you're right. I only had one experience with this. My mother got an iPad as a present from someone and asked me to put some music on it. MP3s I ripped (I think with lame) from CDs. After 2-3 hours of installing, reinstalling iTunes, making libraries, synchronizing, pressing "agree" on everything it prompted and so on, the only effect on the iPad was that the sample music it came with was gone.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Thursday December 18 2014, @01:28PM
I've only ever used iTunes on a Mac - just drop your MP3 on iTunes (or copy it to the "Automatically add to iTunes" folder) and away you go. Amazon's music downloader/player can do that automatically.
Maybe the Windows experience is not so seamless - it offers more opportunities for conflicts, plus its not exactly in Apple's interest to make their PC software as good as the Mac versions.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday December 18 2014, @02:52PM
The windows version is pretty rough. It's slow and leaves a bunch of services running 24/7. But like you said, that may be intentional. I have the feeling it's because iTunes requires a lot of infrastructure to function so they had to install a lot of system level libraries and services to get it working on windows. Linux seems to be a non-starter. You have to use an iTunes alternative.
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(Score: 2) by theluggage on Thursday December 18 2014, @06:29PM
The windows version is pretty rough.
That's the impression I've been forming - I think it explains a lot of the anti-iDevice sentiment. iTunes on Mac is a long way from perfect (main problem is bloat from its expansion way beyond the "tunes" thing) but its fairly good at its job.
Linux seems to be a non-starter. You have to use an iTunes alternative.
I'm not sure what combination of misconceptions would lead a Linux user to buy an iDevice. Open Source and DRM do not make good bedfellows... but its not like the iPod is the first or last hardware device to lack proper Linux support.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday December 18 2014, @06:59PM
When i bought mine there were very few mp3 players on the market. The iPod was fantastic in comparison to others. This was only a few years post-napster and mp3s were still not a common way to store music. Everyone still had cd wallets in their cars. There was a lot of 3rd party ipod support for linux. It worked great as long as you did not ever use iTunes (it would delete your music).
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(Score: 2) by halcyon1234 on Thursday December 18 2014, @07:37PM
Hi, theluggage. I'm from the International Committee of Excellence in Understatements (Internet Division). I just wanted to inform you that you're now in the running for Understatement of the Year. You should be very proud of your accomplishment. As a non-voting member of the committee, I cannot personally comment on your chances of winning, but from my keyboard to your eyes, let's just say that I'm also on the nominating committee for Understatement of the Decade, and when we meet in a few years to come up with the shortlist, well, let's just say I wouldn't be shocked if your ears were burning a bit.
Original Submission [thedailywtf.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @07:45PM
No, what you were is lucky. Throughout its history I have known many people who had troubles trying to mixing Apple and other formats on the same iPod. 99% of those problems went away with the disappearance of DRM. And then let's not get started on those who accidentally pulled their ipod off dock and corrupted the unit and Windows iTunes could never seem to fix it properly even after a full factory reset. Apple was/is shrewdly devious in its' marketing to make people think iPods and its other equipment is better than the alternatives of the time. Which it might be on average, but on individual cases is merely more expensive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @09:55AM
That's what the two "related links" at the bottom point to. Sorry if this is a known issue.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @04:10PM
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday December 18 2014, @11:46PM
>Apple countered that it was only preventing iPods from being hacked or damaged by third-party data. The company said the protections were implemented to prevent people from listening to pirated music--a claim the jury upheld.
Wait, so preventing iPods from being hacked or damaged == preventing people from listening to pirated music? Is preventing people from listening to pirated music even legal? What if cars came with a hidden "feature" that called the police when it detects marijuana smoke? Or better yet, self-destructed? That'll bring down drug numbers for sure.
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