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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: 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.
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(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?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(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.