We all know that people’s outlook on Apple can easily range from not wanting anything to do with them to waiting hours in line in the cold to pay hundreds of dollars for their gizmo of the moment.
But, it sounds like Apple had been doing something behind the backs of their customers that they will not be very appreciate of, now that their secret has been discovered.
During a court hearing in Oakland, Calif. it was revealed that the mega-corporation had been knowingly deleting songs from users’ iPods that had been downloaded from competing music services between 2007 and 2009.
According to attorney Patrick Coughlin, when a user tried to sync songs which had been downloaded from another service to their iPods, iTunes would receive an error message. The message would tell the user they needed to restore the factory setting and once that had been completed, the music from the rival services would be deleted.
“You guys decided to give them the worst possible experience and blow up [a user’s library]” Coughlin told Apple security director, Augustin Farruguia.
Farruguia responded by saying: “Apples contends the moves were legitimate security measures.” He also claimed that hacker with names like “DVD Jon” and “Requiem” made Apple “very paranoid” about protecting iTunes.
When asked why they did not tell users about this, Farruguia responded by saying “We don’t need to give users too much information” and that information would “confuse users.”
At present time, the class-action lawsuit is seeking $350 million in damages, claiming Apple abused their power to enforce their monopoly status in the digital music world.
If Apple ends up being found guilty of the claims, the damages could triple what is currently being sought at the moment, meaning this could easily cost them $1 billion under the antitrust laws.
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