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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 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.