The iTunes antitrust trial started on Tuesday and the mud is definitely slinging.
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.
Perhaps Apple is evil. Perhaps the company was so afraid of losing to Real Networks, and other competing music services/devices, that they intentionally erased competing music from users’ iPods. Perhaps.
Another possibility is that this was an emerging design problem. That is, the sort of problem that comes up with brand new technology as it evolves to meet unforeseeable demands. When those sorts of problems occur, you make the best of things, try to find a way to make the customer happy, and then you move on with a lesson learned.
Have you ever lost data due to poorly thought through design? I certainly have. When that happens, do you ever consider that that data loss was intentional, the result of corporate greed?
To me, that’s the dividing line here. Coughlin is painting a picture of evil intent. In all the years I’ve been using Apple products, I’ve just never seen that kind of thinking.
UPDATE: At the heart of this lawsuit is Apple’s reaction to Real Networks’ reverse engineering of the iPod so they could place their music on hardware that Apple built, without any agreement with Apple. When Apple forced a factory reset, the DRM-protected music was restored, but the music uploaded via the Real Networks hack was lost.
Snarkiness aside (you can read about Steve Jobs’ comments here), is this an unreasonable response on the part of Apple?