Lawsuit Alleges Apple Deleted Competitor's Music from Users' iTunes Account to Prevent iPod Use

Apple might not even produce iPod Classic anymore but antitrust lawsuits never get old. One that might be particularly interesting to the millions of people who owned one of the most successful digital music players in history: Plaintiffs in a suit against the company allege that Apple intentionally deleted music from competing platforms that users attempted to store on iTunes, as recently as 2009.

According the lawsuit, users who attempted to sync their iPods with files from other services received an error message encouraging them to "restore factory settings," which when obligees would remove all non-Apple music files from iTunes while retaining the rest of the user's catalog.

Apple wasn't commenting to either The Wall Street Journal or Rolling Stone but plenty of e-mail evidence shared in the courtroom cast a negative light on the competitive strategies of the company, even if they didn't directly implicate apple in music destruction. The most telling was a 2003 message from Steve Jobs to an employee noting that "we need to make sure when Music Match launches...they cannot use iPod."

Although Jobs was notorious for his unsympathetic approach to competition, it's tough to claim that preventing other music formats from being played on iTunes is illegal. After all, the video game industry has made huge profits from introducing different games for different companies and systems. The main issue here is whether Apple committed a crime by deleting files from users' computers.

The current lawsuit is seeking $330 million in damages but that could go up to nearly $1 billion by the end of litigation, based on antitrust laws. One issue hurting the plaintiff's case is the inability to certify the purchase dates for some of the iPods in question.

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Apple