Seems insane, but about 10 years ago a class-action lawsuit was filed against Apple for some unsavory business practices. Allegedly, the California electronics giant deleted songs from consumers’ iPods without any prior warning, explicitly because the music was obtained from their competitors. Now, the plaintiffs are looking to get $350 million from Apple for the period between 2007 to 2009, citing that this money was spent trying to add the songs back to their collections.
Patrick Coughlin, an attorney representing the case, explained that when users tried to transfer music to an iPod from rival services, an error window would pop up and prompt them to restore their factory settings, a.k.a. deleting the hard drive. When users’ iPods rebooted, they were surprised to find that the songs in question had been deleted. Apple has countered this claim by saying that the measure was intended to boost security against a hacker loophole, and that users didn’t receive more notice about the deleted songs because it might be too confusing to explain the security issue.
All in all, this seems like a seriously first-world lawsuit. I don’t know who to believe, but I wish I could’ve deleted that U2 album as easily as Apple deletes potentially dangerous music. That thing stayed on my phone for like 2 months…it just wouldn’t go away no matter how I tried. Hmm, maybe we should file a class-action lawsuit against Apple for the U2 album next…
• Apple: http://www.apple.com
