If you owned an iPod between 2007 and 2009, Apple Inc. secretly deleted all your music not bought from the iTunes Music Store. Yesterday, during in-court proceedings of Apple’s iPod/iTunes antitrust lawsuit, the plaintiffs’ lawyers claimed Apple took deliberate steps to prevent users from playing music bought from third-party vendors on their iPods.

Patrick Coughlin, one of the attorneys representing the estimated eight million consumers and iPod resellers who brought the suit, said Apple purposely deleted music bought from third-party vendors when users synced their iPods with their iTunes library.

Users attempting to sync an iPod with the iTunes library in order to play music bought from competing vendors would receive an ambiguous error message prompting them to restore the factory settings on the iPod. During the factory restore process all music not bought from iTunes would be deleted.

“You guys decided to give them the worst possible experience and blow up a user’s music library,” Coughlin said.

According to Coughlin, this was part of a deliberate effort by Apple to prevent music from rival music services such as RealPlayer and Musicmatch from being played on iPod. This resulted in Apple being able to overcharge consumers for the iPod and lock them into the ecosystem.

Defending the need for the factory reset and preventing third-party music from being played on the iPod, Apple said the system was a put in place to shield users form malicious attacks. During his testimony, Apple Security Director Augustin Farrugia said it was not necessary to provide users with more detail about the error message because, “We don’t need to give users too much information,” and “We don’t want to confuse users.” According to Farrugia, Apple was “very paranoid” when it came to protecting iTunes.

This paranoia is well documented. Steve Jobs, who’s email correspondence and past testimony is playing a pivotal role in this lawsuit, admitted in a 2011 videotaped deposition that he helped write a press release that accused rival RealNetworks, Inc of “adopting the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod”.

The class action lawsuit kicked off on Tuesday and is being heard in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California. Apple marketing head Phil Schiller and iTunes chief Eddy Cue are both expected to testify during the trial.

photo credit: Global X via photopin cc