Apple Accused of Deleting Songs From iPods Without Users' Knowledge 250
A reader writes with this excerpt from a story at AppleInsider that says "During in-court proceedings of Apple's iPod/iTunes antitrust lawsuit on Wednesday, plaintiffs' lawyers claimed Apple surreptitiously deleted songs not purchased through the iTunes Music Store from users' iPods. Attorney Patrick Coughlin, representing a class of individuals and businesses, said Apple intentionally wiped songs downloaded from competing services when users performed a sync with their iTunes library, reports The Wall Street Journal. As explained by the publication, users attempting to sync an iPod with an iTunes library containing music from a rival service, such as RealNetworks, would see an ambiguous error message without prompting them to perform a factory reset. After restoring the device, users would find all non-iTunes music had disappeared. ... It is unclear if iTunes or iPod encountered a legitimate problem, though Coughlin seems to be intimating Apple manufactured the error message as part of a supposed gambit to stop customers from using their iPod to play back music from stores other than iTunes. For its part, Apple said the system was a safety measure installed to protect users."
Not surprising at all. (Score:4, Insightful)
THAT is why many people avoid Apple like the plague. They've lost their lead, had their fun and are now fighting fowl.
Re:Not surprising at all. (Score:5, Funny)
They're engaged in competition with avians? Neat. I'd pay to see that.
Re:Not surprising at all. (Score:4, Funny)
Romulans. And their bird of prey. Apple will lose.
Re:Not surprising at all. (Score:4, Funny)
fruit vs poultry. I will eat the loser.
Get the facts first (Score:2, Informative)
First of all, what lead has Apple lost that it ever really had? They're set to cross the $1 trillion market cap barrier—for the first time of any company ever—in the not-too-distant future, selling iPhones and Macs faster than ever before, and iPads only very slightly slower than their peak.
Now, if you were paying any attention whatsoever, instead of just writing a knee-jerk Apple-hate comment, you'd know that this was in reference to acts that allegedly occurred many years ago, before the iPhon
Re:Get the facts first (Score:5, Informative)
and removed the songs with bogus FairPlay from people's devices, because they would no longer work.
See that's the thing, it's MY filesystem on MY device.
If the files exploited a hole in the DRM, then the DRM was patched and the files no longer work... fine, the files don't work, but you can't delete my files on my device .
Face it, Apple screwed the pooch and got called out on it. Hopefully they get a sharp smack in the nose with a newspaper, learn from the past and don't do stupid shit like this again, and everyone can move on.
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if you want to have total control over your device and manage every single configuration and file copy by hand...you don't buy an iPod.
Or any Apple products.
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so what should they have done? Just let those pieces of random garbage data take up space on the iPod for the rest of its life? Forced you to erase the whole thing just to get rid of them?
They should have gone with option 1, just left the non-working files on the device. As you said, there had been third party software that could access the files, and presumably RealMedia, or whoever sold the tracks in the first place, would still have their media manager that would be able to play the files. If the user was technically savvy enough to use a secondary store + sync software it can be presumed that they could use other software to surgically remove the files instead of clobbering the whole F
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"so what should they have done? Just let those pieces of random garbage data take up space on the iPod for the rest of its life?"
Do you realize how inane your argument here is? The answer to your question there is simply "yes". If they wanted to be customer friendly, pop up a warning message that files were detected that were now garbage and prompt for a deletion.
OK, that's not an unreasonable option. Apple could have chosen to do that, and that might have avoided this issue. But it seems likely to me that when Apple wrote the iPod OS (not to be confused with iOS) and the iTunes synchronization mechanism, they didn't even consider the possibility that someone would manage to put songs on there that tricked the iPod into thinking they were FairPlay DRMed files, and thus it would have been a considerable extra effort for them to put such a notification in place. But e
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How can you be such a corporate apologist?! Apple in no place advertised that the only DRM music that could be played on iPods was Fairplay music, this screwed over customers, it was a shit thing to do but you go out and defend and praise Apple for it. "Oh yes thank you master for fucking me over Ill tell everybody how good it was, may I have another?"
They may not have put up giant posters proclaiming that the only DRMed music that you could play on an iPod was FairPlay, but it's not exactly like it was some kind of secret, either.
I'm not saying I don't feel bad for the people who honestly didn't know how these things worked who bought music from RealNetworks, then had their music stop working when Apple fixed the loophole. I can imagine how frustrating that would have been.
But that doesn't mean that Apple is at fault for fixing bugs in their code. I sup
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If you can find some actual "tricky, monopolist behaviour" somewhere, I'll give you an answer. Until then, though, all we're talking about is FUD regarding Apple not wanting to go to a lot of effort to implement various random competitors' DRM algorithms...which said competitors would have had to license to them, and provide proper information for third-party implementation of, etc, etc.
Dan Aris
Re:Not surprising at all. (Score:5, Interesting)
How is it unsubstantiated when it is true and has been proven? I rsync my iTunes drive to a remote server every night so I see email reports every day with a list of my music files that Apple deletes. The last delete happened Monday night:
deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/30 Rock 'n' Roll High School.mp3 ...
deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/29 Indian Giver.mp3
deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/28 The KKK Took My Baby Away.mp3
deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/27 I Just Wanna Have Something To Do.mp3
deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/26 Chinese Rock.mp3
deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/25 We Want The Airwaves.mp3
And so on. Apple decided to delete every Ramones song from iTunes. That is why people hate them. Apple considers us subhuman and has no respect for us or our property.
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Re:Not surprising at all. (Score:5, Funny)
If it's any consolation, you really only need one Ramones song. They're all the same anyhow.
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Its funny the way apple fans come in to defend them like this. "No no, what you are seeing is not possible, I know how this piece of proprietary software works!"
Im not saying who is right and who is wrong but to come in and say he cant be seeing what he is seeing based on your assumption of how something works is pretty ridiculous. Either work to better understand the situation or give some evidence to back your opinion especially when you are talking about the behavior of proprietary software.
Re:Not surprising at all. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll bet if you do constantly rsync your iTunes music directory you will see deleted files. Because if you have iTunes set to "manage music" it will rename files according to some scheme that seems to randomly change over time. (Or because you changed some metadata like the song's name.) So it's entirely possible that a whole bunch of files were "deleted" - because iTunes moved them to a different location, and as far as I know, rsync doesn't have the ability to track files being moved around. (And a bit of Googling suggests this is in fact the case and offers some workarounds.)
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I don't think you get it.
This behavior happened back in the day and is still wrong.
With that being said, I dislike Apple for many other reasons, this one being just one of those many.
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The Apple RDF is in place, there's no helping them!
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Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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THAT is why many people avoid Apple like the plague. They've lost their lead, had their fun and are now fighting fowl.
Yup. Random mostly-unsubstantiated rumors that totally happened to a friend of your cousin's roommate are indeed why many people avoid Apple products.
More importantly, it now seems it never happened to any of the plaintiffs: http://online.wsj.com/articles/judge-questions-plaintiffs-in-apple-antitrust-case-1417734307?mod=ST1 [wsj.com]
A federal judge Thursday questioned whether any of the plaintiffs in a long-running antitrust suit against Apple Inc. had actually bought the iPods at issue in the case.
“What am I supposed to do if I don’t have a plaintiff?” asked a concerned U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers after the jury left the courtroom at the end of Thursday’s proceedings.
Judge Rogers said that in a letter submitted to her late Wednesday night, Apple’s lawyers said there is no evidence that the plaintiffs’ two class representatives purchased the models of iPods focused on in the trial.
Judge Rogers’ comments raised the prospect that the 10-year-old case, in which the plaintiffs are seeking $350 million in damages, could end quickly in Apple’s favor.
home taping is killing music (Score:5, Insightful)
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Around that time period, it was quite common to transfer music files from the CD albums you bought to you MP3 player.
I knew it! (Score:2, Interesting)
I have been making backups of my iTunes library for years because a long time ago I noticed that a large number of my songs had just gone missing. I never heard anything about it so thought it was just something I had done wrong.
Re:I knew it! (Score:5, Interesting)
My neice tried to load a thumb drive of MP3's from my music library into her Ipod a couple years back. Itunes instead reformatted the thumb drive. I thought she just screwed up, so I reloaded the thumb drive from my PC and we tried again. Itunes gave some message about "scanning media" and reformatted the thumb drive again.
I said then that I would probably never buy another Apple product. I still feel that way.
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Did iTunes do it or did the OS she was running do it?
Because as far as I know, unless the thumbdrive was an iPod itself, iTunes isn't capable of formatting it.
I'm guessing that you did something like create a thumbdrive using NTFS or whatever Mac OS X's file system is (HFS?) and then tried to use it on the opposite OS, which balked, and offered to reformat the drive into a filesystem it understood, which your niece just hit "OK" for.
Because iTunes may be a piece of shit (as far as I can tell, when iTunes Ma
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Of the tens of thousands of songs I have in iTunes and have had on iPods not as single one was legally purchased from iTunes or any other store, and I've never experienced a single deletion. I have no idea where people are getting this idea.
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Neither have I. I've never had it delete a song. What I have seen it do (multiple fucking times) is refuse to sync new music over to an iPhone. It'll get as far as "waiting for items to copy" and then just sit there for as long as you're willing to wait, not copying a thing. Googling (and bitching about it on Facebook) reveals I am nowhere near alone in experiencing this problem.
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So, then, the other way around: OS X's filesystem (it is HFS, right?) on Windows. Because I've still never seen iTunes try to format a thumbdrive, but I've definitely seen Windows offer to format a thumbdrive it doesn't recognize the filesystem on.
and the defense attorney gose like: (Score:5, Funny)
"Your honor, it is true that we deleted the songs, but one of them was from Justin Bieber, we thought that the public good..."
- "Why didn't you tell us earlier? Case Dismissed."
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Sounds more like technical short-sightedness (Score:4, Interesting)
If auto-synch is left on, of course it erases the entire library and replaces it with your iTunes library. If the non-iTunes purchased songs were loaded onto the iPod from another source, then of course they don't get re-added until you go and add them again from the other source. People have been aware of this at least since my friend and I would load songs onto eachother's 3rd gen ipod with dock connector back in highschool.
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Well, and it depends on what you're doing.
I was trying to do something on my iPod touch the other week. The message it gave me was that there were things on the iPod which hadn't been transferred to iTunes ... took me a while to r
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What it appears to boil down to is this:
1) User has an iOS device
2) User syncs some stuff from iTunes to that device
3) User uses a third party system, such as that run by Real, to sync some stuff from the Real media manager to the iOS device
4) Device needs to be wiped and reset
5) iTunes wipes the device and restores from backup, which doesn't include music (or a bunch of other things).
6) iTunes then restores the music its settings indicate was previously synced to the device
7) User gets all up in arms when
Re: Sounds more like technical short-sightedness (Score:2)
Wow. You spent all that time explaining how iOS devices sync with iTunes when the lawsuit is referring to a time period before iTunes existed.
Only if you've destroyed the laws of causality. (Score:2)
Wow. You spent all that time explaining how iOS devices sync with iTunes when the lawsuit is referring to a time period before iTunes existed.
Umm...no, sorry, you lose. iTunes existed for years before the first iPod was ever sold.
Dan Aris
Re: Only if you've destroyed the laws of causality (Score:2)
Typo. That should have been before the first iOS devices ever existed.
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What the hell are you talking about?
I've been using iTunes since around 2001 or so.
Unless you see something in TFA the rest of us don't, you seem to be talking out of your ass. Because iTunes sure as hell existed
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iTunes remains an astonishingly bad user interface. It wasn't originally an Apple product, which explains some of it, but they took it over a decade ago, and it's still incredibly bad. (Caveat: I finally gave up on my iPod, so maybe it's gotten better in the last two years. But given how abominable it was, with massive and obvious bugs being ignored, for so long, I doubt it.)
I don't know why Apple has a blind spot for an incredibly bad user interface for a flagship product (I mean the music store, rather th
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I left my iPod Shuffle in a pants pocket and put in through a wash and dry cycle. It didn't survive[1]. Am I better off or worse off? I certainly never used iTunes, though; I managed it with a Linux application.
[1] Apple's hardware is pretty solid, but this was a little too much.
Re:Sounds more like technical short-sightedness (Score:5, Informative)
If auto-synch is left on, of course it erases the entire library and replaces it with your iTunes library.
Could you explain the logic of this to me? Using phrases like "of course" seems erroneous to me. If I was developing an application and all I had in mind was the end user, I would handle a sync just like I would handle any other sync: merge the two things you're syncing. When you sync your phone with your computer, does it delete everything and add only new content? No. It 'syncs' which should me a node A gets info from node B and vice versa. No deleting.
The iPod sync doesn't work that way. The library on the iPod is a mirror of the one on the computer. The computer is the master device, and if you make changes to the library on the iPod, they will not be kept unless they are also made on the master library.
When the iPod is synced, the master library is what is used to determine what is on there - it's purely a mirror of the computer, not a two way sync/merge. After the release of the iPhone (and other touchscreen iDevices) the option to consolidate tracks you had downloaded elsewhere was added as part of the sync process, but in the early days when it was designed to be used with a single master library when in full auto mode, it did not do this - it simply told you that it would delete the tracks if you selected "yes, delete the tracks and sync".
Where this would trip people up is if they would load music onto their iPod manually (manual control was always an option) on one computer, then later connected it up to a computer that had automatic sync set up (iTunes warns you if it will delete files, but who reads dialog boxes, eh?), and thus any changes made to the iPod are then lost.
Adding those "third party" tracks to iTunes and syncing them to the iPod worked as it always did, or if you wanted to run with multiple different iTunes libraries you just turned off the automatic sync and just manually controlled what iTunes would copy to your iPod.
Of course, that doesn't make for very click-baity headlines or nonsense lawsuits.
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This is one of the better descriptions of how it works, well done. There are apps that allow a sync back from the iPod to the iTunes library, but I've never tried them.
My challenges are that I have much more music in my library from CDs etc than I do for my iPods/iPhones, so I can't auto-sync (they have a 'Sync until full' feature now, but I'm not bothering with that on my phone), so I'm stuck with manually syncing them. Then when they have an iTunes update, or if I use a new device, I have to click two b
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While this may be the way it worked, the issue is that they didn't tell users this. Instead of telling users "music you added manually will be overwritten" they threw up a generic error and then told the user they had to factory reset the phone. It's fine i your sync deletes the stuff on the phone and overwrites it with the stuff from the computer. It's not alright if you purposely hide this fact from the user so they don't know what is going on.
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Instead of telling users "music you added manually will be overwritten" they threw up a generic error and then told the user they had to factory reset the phone.
Well, this is the confusing part for me, a non-Apple user. Both TFA and the summary say:
You say the users were told to do a factory reset; the articles says they were not prompted to perform one.
If, as you say, they were told to do a factory res
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I thought it was an odd thing to say, so I wonder if it was meant to say "...would see an ambiguous error message about prompting them to perform a factory reset."
After all, why even mention factory resetting at all if there was no prompt to do so? They could have been equally factual by writing "...would see an ambiguous error message without prompting them to ride a giraffe."
Or was it supposed to be something along the lines, "...would see ambiguous error message, without prompting them, to perform a fact
is the claim they're triggering a fake reset need? (Score:5, Informative)
From what I can tell, what's being claimed isn't that Apple is specifically wiping the files, but rather that: 1) users are told to factory-reset their device; and 2) this wipes all files; except that 3) after factory reset, iTunes restores the iTunes-purchased files from Apple.
#2 and #3 don't seem particularly nefarious on their own. You'd expect a factory reset to wipe the device, and you'd expect a cloud service like iTunes to support restoring your purchases from (and only from) that service. So what it seems to boil down to is: was situation #1 popping up nefariously, i.e. Apple is purposely triggering an unnecessary "please factory reset your device" request even when there is nothing wrong with the device and no need to factory-reset it? And furthermore, that Apple is doing this based on detecting competitors' services on the device? That seems... surprisingly blatant if true.
Another possibility, which Apple seems to be hinting at, is that some kind of "tamper-detection" DRM is setting off reset-your-device false positives.
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The only thing I can figure is that Apple's throwing an error when the iTunes_Control library on the device doesn't match what the sync DB managed by iTunes says should be there. This indicates data corruption, whether it be by gremlins, failed SSD write, or RealNetworks only partially implementing the (closed) sync specification. Since Apple doesn't throw this error when iCloud updates the iTunes_Control library, this means that there exists a way to sync from multiple sources and still not get the error
Re:is the claim they're triggering a fake reset ne (Score:4, Informative)
Real is just trying to sue to get some money because they're just a slowly dying company at this point. They've just slowly been bleeding money and eventually will end up declaring bankruptcy or selling their brand name, though I'm not really sure whey anyone would want it.
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Real is just trying to sue to get some money because they're just a slowly dying company at this point. They've just slowly been bleeding money and eventually will end up declaring bankruptcy or selling their brand name, though I'm not really sure whey anyone would want it.
In electronics, brand names like RCA and Zenith have certainly been sold around. After all, they used to be well-known and well-respected names and... oh wait, never mind, this is Real we're talking about.
A protection measure (Score:2, Insightful)
"We have to protect our users from not giving their money to us!"
If you owned an iPod back in the early '00s (Score:4, Interesting)
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Besides, Winamp really whips the llama's ass...
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You just put it in manual mode. Problem solved.
When it was in auto sync mode it was a mirror of the iTunes library, but putting it in manual control mode allowed you to selectively sync from multiple different libraries and computers. It always worked this way.
It also warned you if it was going to delete anything, but most people (based on this lawsuit) seem to be incapable of reading dialog boxes.
DRM-only? (Score:3)
Were the deleted songs DRM'ed by RealNetworks? (these guys still existed?)
I'm pretty sure that regular MP3 files were not deleted, so it's not really a case of "not bought here", remember that Apple was under a lot of legal obligations by the music labels regarding FairPlay DRM at the time.
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I am pretty sure that everything was deleted on a FACTORY RESET.
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If you do a factory reset and expect anything to not be deleted, you need to go back to school.
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I believe that the suit is claiming that Apple was improperly forcing users to perform a factory reset, rather than claiming that the reset process itself was malicious.
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lol (Score:2)
This is silly...
The entire point of the iPod and iPhones encrypted file system is designed to prevent you from using anything but iTunes. It's a joke to claim it's for "Security" Security? On my iPod? Really? lol!
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i agree with you sir! it's much better for ipods to turn into the equivalent of truck stop whores by letting everybody put files in them, inclubating viruses, then traveling from computer to computer and infecting everybody who plugs into it. It Just Works! you sir should be a security engineer.
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encrypted file system
[Citation needed]
Seriously, years ago when I looked at the filesystem on my 1st generation iPod Nano (which still works and hasn't yet caught fire, probably because I use it in a car, and not as a walkman) the music was simply in an invisible folder with random file names. I presume that the song list was a simple flat database file somewhere in there to keep track of those random file names. It wasn't encrypted, just obfuscated so that you couldn't trivially mount it as a flash drive and copy specific son
Now apple PUTS music on your ipod without your (Score:3)
knowledge. Must be because they are repentant for deleting users' music earlier.
Stop putting part of the comment in the subject bo (Score:2)
x.
lol (Score:5, Informative)
Kind of funny how most of the articles bury (if they even mention it at all) Real (buffering) Network's connection. To put everything in context, The iPod could play unprotected mp3s, aacs, and wavs. They could also play FairPlay DRM files purchased through the iTunes store. Real (buffering) Networks wanted to sell music that could play on iPods but they also wanted their DRM.
Fuck you DRM, and fuck you Real (buffering) Networks. Good riddance to both of you.
Re:lol (Score:5, Insightful)
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If Apple does indeed own the proprietary DRM, other companies have no right to step on their turf. I was wondering how Real was able to sell songs to ipod users since the itunes-to-ipod protocols and code are likely closed.
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Bars/concerts don't pay enough, it's too much unnecessary (they could be composing new songs instead) and tiring work. The sound quality at concerts nowhere near the quality of finished, fine tuned CD quality. And most of all, why do you think you have the right to consume someone's work without payment or permission?
Apple deleted my songs (Score:2, Informative)
Songs I bought didn't survive an iTunes ' upgrade'. So Apple removes content from iTunes and from your account " magically". I suspect they stopped paying an artist and sold copies anyway. Magic erased evidence on iTunes for Apple which propogated down to the client accounts!
BUT...to get my songs back off backup I paid a service fee of $122.00 to fire up an antiquated hard drive and copy...priceless
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It is very clear that you have never owned an iPod or used iTunes with one. The model (particularly at the time in question) is that the master copy of the music is kept on your computer's hard drive. You manage the list of music files on the computer via iTunes, and then iTunes does a one-way synchronization of the files and index to match the master set.
What happened here is that Real found a way to steal (yes, I said it) usage of Apple's DRM method via a loophole. They used Apple's proprietary code and
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That's the cloud for you (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what happens when you reliquish control of your digital life for the sake of the superficial convenience of not having to maintain your own hardware and perform your own backups: when the third party you entrust your data to decides you can't have it anymore, all you can do is bitch and moan and ask politely to get back what's rightfully yours. But *you* don't decide: your comfortable and convenient digital jailer does.
At the end of the day, Apple customers only have themselves to blame for what Apple does to them. And the same goes for Google, Microsoft and all the others, when they decide to shaft their own userbase without warning.
Re:That's the cloud for you (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's what happens if you leave the sync settings on auto and ignore the "there are files on this device that are not in your library, these will be deleted? Continue? [Cancel Sync] [Continue Sync]" dialog box.
Set the iPod to manual (or don't factory reset it without a backup) and the click bait goes away.
This entire thing boiled down to "I factory reset something and didn't have a backup. Wah! Apple deleted my stuff!"
What would you say to someone who formatted their device without a backup, expecting everything to still be on it afterwards?
I call BS (Score:4, Insightful)
Only 3 of my albums were bought on iTune, yet i've *never* had anything deleted in the 10 or so years I've used ipods and iphones.
"synch" isn't really synch (Score:2)
It always appeared to me that "synch" in the case of an ipod and itunes isn't really a synch, it's a dump (overwrite) from itunes to the ipod. I never assumed that anything I had on the ipod that was not in my itunes account would exist after a "synch". I don't think this is diabolical, just the way the itunes/ipod interface works. After all, the paradigm assumes that the only information on the ipod is from itunes.
Now that I think about it, ipods that have a camera would have to truly synch in some fash
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It always appeared to me that "synch" in the case of an ipod and itunes isn't really a synch, it's a dump (overwrite) from itunes to the ipod.
"Sync" doesn't imply two-directional, it simply means "make the two things align". In TV-land, that means all the monitors and cameras align their horizontal and vertical sync to the master sync generator. The master never cares what the cameras think is the correct timing. In iTunes-land, that means "make the iThingy look like the master".
It's relatively new that "sync" means "change everybody to look like everybody else", and even then it's not always possible to do that. Palm was very good at it; Googl
U2 (Score:2)
Safety? (Score:2)
For its part, Apple said the system was a safety measure installed to protect users.
Yes. Music files can be very dangerous. Many injuries and deaths have been reported...
(Or am I to assume a different meaning from the words "safety" and "protect"?)
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I think they were using the the NSA dictionary of safety and protect... If that helps...
Microsoft must be laughing.... (Score:2)
"Itunes ain't done 'till RealPlay won't run..."
A real bitch to be a monopoly, ain't it?
safely protecting Apple iTunes profits (Score:2)
by safely protecting consumers from purchasing songs for less money elsewhere
Whats an Apple Store? (Score:2)
Yes, I'm one of those nuts who still rips cd's to mp3 and puts them on my devices.
Relatives ask why it is so hard for them to share music between their devices... LOL.
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What did you expect? (Score:2)
I have literally NO sympathy for complainers that purchase products even knowing ahead of time that they lock you into monoculture that is arbitrarily and completely controlled by a company with a long history of abusing their own customers (e.g. Apple, Microsoft, Sony).
Are they simply meeting the definition of insanity (same action different result) or do they just have such a ridiculously overinflated ego that they seriously expect to be treated better than all the other previously abused customers?
Time to switch players? (Score:2)
I just read that it's possible to transfer & play your I-tunes files on other devices, like an android phone. With an itunes player, I don't feel I own something if music files can be deleted without my permission. We have one of these players, but I've always been wary of it.
There are plenty of other players/dev boards that can read in music from something like a micro-SD card and play music without all the DRM hassles. There are plenty of open-source projects out there that use inexpensive boards
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>If this is a case of what it's being made to sound to be, that actual non-DRM, legally purchased files got burnt out? I don't believe said things existed at the time, did they?
People were legally format shifting before the iDevices existed, so yes, those things did exist.
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And nobody ever had friends who were in an amateur band that used to play at the local pub and sell recordings for beer money. No, never met anyone like that. *eyeroll*
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There were legal mp3 sites like emusic from the late 90s. Not to mention it being legal to rip cds you own for your own personal use. And the thousands of bands which purposely posted songs in mp3 format for free as a form of advertising.
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I miss MyMP3.com. It was the best service for sharing MY songs from MY cd's across all MY computers. Fuck the major record labels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Can we hold the froth first? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to mention that iTunes itself provides this feature. "Rip. Mix. Burn," anyone? This whole story sounds like ambulance-chaser bullshit.
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I'm me willing to bet number 2 was true, but they screwed it up and rather than admit that they're trying to freeload off of iTunes and the iPod, they're blaming them for not sharing.
Despite the fact that RealNetworks had years to get into the game and establish a real actual standard. Sorry RN, you snooze, you fucking lose.
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If this is a case of what it's being made to sound to be, that actual non-DRM, legally purchased files got burnt out? I don't believe said things existed at the time, did they?
You realize that DRM came after the MP3 format, right? And, in fact, that DRM was basically a direct response to people making and sharing MP3 files over services like Napster? I have a small library of fantastic 56kbps quality MP3 files because I sat there and loaded each CD into my computer, played it back and recorded the audio going out, then chopped up that giant audio track into the individual songs. Eventually I found a tool that wouldn't involve me sitting there until the CD finished playing.
So,
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So, if I loaded all of those MP3s that I made myself onto my iPod, you're saying that it's ok for Apple to delete them?
You wouldn't load them onto the iPod. You would import them into iTunes, and iTunes makes sure that the music you told it to be put onto the iPod will be put onto the iPod, and nothing else. And if you import all your .mp3s into iTunes, they are absolutely safe there.
That's how iTunes and iPod have always worked: In iTunes, you set up what music you want on your iPod, and iTunes puts it there. Take any music you want, add it to iTunes, and it's fine.
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Suppose you buy an expensive watch from a guy operating from the back of a van. We can assume that the goods being sold are stolen and the transaction is illegal and that the buyer may have to return the stolen property. That's what's happening here, the illegal property (songs) is being destroyed.
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