Did Apple Delete Some Non-iTunes Music from Your iPod?
Thinking back now, I remember being puzzled about some strange disappearances from my iPod. Songs that I knew I loaded into a playlist suddenly weren’t there. Was I losing my mind? Turns out I wasn’t. Apple was deleting them. 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.
