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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
(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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