Collective action involving AppleCare continues in the courts; Apple is accused of “modern piracy”

Among the various legal imbroglios in which Apple is inserted, two of them have attracted a lot of attention recently. The first is not exactly new and has been going on since mid-2016, when a group of users sued the company for violating some of its own terms. AppleCare.

The second makes a very serious accusation of piracy against Apple, more specifically involving some of the biggest names in music in the “golden years”, such as Charlie Parker, Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles, as we will see later.

Collective action involving AppleCare

A court in San Jose (California) has pursued a class action lawsuit that accuses Apple of using refurbished products (refurbished) replacing gadgets guaranteed by the AppleCare Protection Plan and the AppleCare +, despite Apple’s contractual promise to consumers to replace “new or equivalent to new” devices.

As we said, the lawsuit was filed against Apple in July 2016 by customers who were unhappy with the fact that their iPhones and iPads had been replaced with such refurbished devices, claiming that this violates the AppleCare Terms and Conditions and the Consumer Legal Remedies Act, from the state of California.

The plans [AppleCare] Apple intends to provide consumers with devices “equivalent to new in performance and reliability”. What this phrase means is “new”, as refurbished devices can never be equivalent to new ones in performance and reliability. […] Refurbished is synonymous with the term “refurbished”, that is, a second-hand unit that has been modified to look new for all purposes relevant to this dispute.

Thus, they claim that when describing replacement devices as “new”, it was expected that Apple would supply devices that have never been used or sold before, with all new parts. For this reason, the prosecution seeks to compensate for the difference in value between the new and refurbished devices that Apple provided to members of the class action.

Apple accused of “modern piracy”

Icon - Apple Music for Android

As unlikely as it could be, just this year Apple was twice accused of piracy in the music industry. The first case happened last May, when the son of the composer Harold Arlen (of “Over the Rainbow”) took the Cupertino giant (and other companies) to court for “distributing unauthorized versions of copyrighted tracks”.

Apple is now the target of a new lawsuit filed by Four Jays Music, which claims the company has pirated recordings of some of the greatest names in 20th century music in the United States, such as Billie Holliday, Charlie Parker, Dean Martin, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles.

Of course, Apple just wouldn’t go around pirating music around; the story behind this is that Apple would have agreed to the music licensing terms with two agencies (Orchard and Cleopatra), but the fact was that none of them had rights to the recordings in the first place.

In addition to claiming that Apple was aware of the infringement, Four Jays Music suggests that the company could have used “digital marks” to prevent such recordings from being identified under the labels of the companies with which it had agreed to the license terms. – which, if proven, would lead to a breach of another law.

The author of the lawsuit seeks an injunction to end the distribution of songs that were not properly licensed, in addition to the payment of damages and legal fees. Apple did not comment on the case.

via AppleInsider, Law360