Apple Secretly Deleted iPod Content From Rival Music Service

[Maura]

MacRumors reports today on a story in The Wall Street Journal about an iPod user who claims that Apple surreptitiously deleted content on their iPod that had been downloaded on rival music services.

The situation came to light during a class-action iPod lawsuit against Apple in the Northern District of California, which accuses the company of violating antitrust laws by locking its iPods to iTunes.

The attorney for the plaintiff, Patrick Coughlin, said that when the user tried to sync the contents on his iPod to iTunes, having previously downloaded music from a rival service, he would get a vague error message, advising the owner to restore his device to factory settings. Any music that had been downloaded from a rival service was then deleted and not able to be played.

Apple security director Augustin Farrugia said that the error message was deliberately vague so as not to confuse people, and said that the deletion of music obtained from third-party sources was done to protect the consumer from hackers and malicious content.

Source: MacRumors