The tech gurus over at Apple have had a little bit to answer for in 2014. First of all, they removed our beloved iPod Classic from shelves, that’s not to mention the sneaky move of automatically downloading U2’s new record to millions of iPhones overnight, and it’s now been revealed that the company have allegedly deleted music off devices.
As Consequence Of Sound (via The Wall Street Journal) reports, Apple are currently embroiled in a $350-million anti-trust lawsuit, with a group of disgruntled consumers claiming that Apple had “locked” them into an Apple “ecosystem” where only music authorised by Apple could be used on their devices, deleting any others from their iPods.
The group’s argument against Apple begun back in 2004 when consumers were downloading music from RealPlayer and then attempting to load the tracks onto their iPods, to no prevail.
They allege that their Apple product would not sync the RealPlayer downloaded tunes, instead forcing them to restore their iPod, effectively deleting the RealPlayer download music permanently. On this, their main argument states that Apple did not inform users of the restore process and deletion of music when downloaded from competing websites.
As the court battle continues, The Wall Street Journal writes that Apple did in fact remove music downloaded from competing music services from owner’s iPods between the years 2007 – 2009 without informing users.
The class-action case saw Apple security director Augustin Farruguia apparently acknowledge that Apple had in fact removed the competitor-downloaded music from iPods, claiming that it was a necessary move of security to avoid hackers. He briefly commented on this, “We don’t need to give users too much information, we don’t want to confuse users.”
It’s look more and more probable that this case could land Apple in boiling hot water and if they are in fact found of breaching anti-trust laws, the sought-out $350-million in damages could unbelievably triple in its number. The class-action suit will continue next week, which will see Apple’s software chief Eddy Cue and head of marketing Phil Schiller provide testimonies.
