The iTunes antitrust trial started on Tuesday and the mud is definitely slinging.
From the Wall Street Journal:
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.
Perhaps Apple is evil. Perhaps the company was so afraid of losing to Real Networks, and other competing music services/devices, that they intentionally erased competing music from users’ iPods. Perhaps.
Another possibility is that this was an emerging design problem. That is, the sort of problem that comes up with brand new technology as it evolves to meet unforeseeable demands. When those sorts of problems occur, you make the best of things, try to find a way to make the customer happy, and then you move on with a lesson learned.
Have you ever lost data due to poorly thought through design? I certainly have. When that happens, do you ever consider that that data loss was intentional, the result of corporate greed?
To me, that’s the dividing line here. Coughlin is painting a picture of evil intent. In all the years I’ve been using Apple products, I’ve just never seen that kind of thinking.
UPDATE: At the heart of this lawsuit is Apple’s reaction to Real Networks’ reverse engineering of the iPod so they could place their music on hardware that Apple built, without any agreement with Apple. When Apple forced a factory reset, the DRM-protected music was restored, but the music uploaded via the Real Networks hack was lost.
Snarkiness aside (you can read about Steve Jobs’ comments here), is this an unreasonable response on the part of Apple?
I don’t get it though… how did these music files get on there? Only the iPod Touch allowed you to connect to the internet, and I’m not sure how one would download music from a competing service.
This whole thing is confusing to me…
My first iPod (my beloved first-gen Nano) was chock full of songs that, I can assure you, weren’t purchased from iTunes, and nothing ever happened to them. I still mainly purchase music from Amazon and sync it through the iTunes desktop app and have been doing it for years. Never had a problem and never even heard of this happening to anyone, until this story hit. Not saying it didn’t happen, but really, how big of an issue could it have been?
Yeah, I’m with ya. I’m not buying the “evil intent” theory at all. They’re just throwing darts. And I’m with thud71 – I don’t remember ever hearing anything about this.
I think this only applied to music that had DRM from another company and was installed on an iPod through a means other than iTunes. So unprotected MP3s put into iTunes went into an iPod with no problem. But music with DRM that was put onto an iPod though a means other than iTunes was rejected. Does that make sense?
You’re correct. The problem was specific to Apple DRM files that Real was generating.
Putting aside that DRM is bad to begin with, there is no circumstances under which Apple can allow the mechanics of their DRM to be duplicated by another company.
“Putting aside that DRM is bad to begin with, there is no circumstances under which Apple can allow the mechanics of their DRM to be duplicated by another company.”
This is a pretty dumb comment. To use a different example, there’s no circumstances where Amazon could allow Apple to duplicate their DRM so that you could open books purchased in the Kindle Store to work on iBooks? The DRM used on Blu Rays is used by multiple companies, which is why you can watch a Blu Ray on a Sony device or a Panasonic or any other appropriately licensed brand.
Without a signed licensing agreement, obviously. Duh.
That’s not what Real did. They backwards engineered the DRM and wrote code to generate files that would fool the iPod into thinking that Apple had signed the music. That cannot be allowed.
To get some facts straight, because the WSJ didn’t:
In other words: Real “hacked” their way into the iTunes ecosystem against Apple’s permit, Apple shot back. That’s all.
Apple never supported DRM systems of other companies, so if you bought something on Microsoft Music (or whatever it was called), it would not play on iPods. But neither did Microsoft support FairPlay or any other media company any other rival’s DRM formats. It was all individual silos on all sides.
If you did manage to have music in DRM-free formats, Apple never prevented you from playing that on your iPods, regardless of where it came from.