[Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra Guides, News, & Discu] r.dunne:
I'll never own an iPhone, or Apple anything ever. I had an iPod around 2003 or 2004 and I unwittingly dumped about 1400 mp3s that I'd been "collecting" since around '96 when Napster got going. Upon doing so iTunes conveniently also deleted the files from my hard drive. I can't remember if there was an option for that or not but in any case, I wasn't really aware that it had happened and I didn't have them backed up anywhere else. When I found out that iTunes charged $.99 per song, I decided that I didn't want to continue my subscription so I canceled. Shortly after that I decided to give the iPod to my son and get a regular mp3 player to load my music onto and when I plugged it in to load my tunes on to it I discovered that they were missing. I tried to log into the iTunes account I had canceled but it was gone already. I tried to contact Apple and got the customer support run around for a couple of days so I started looking around on the web to see if there were other cases like mine and what, if any results came of them. While doing this I was contacted by someone claiming to be from Apple and was asked for a list of the songs I was missing. I only had a partial list but it was probably about 70 to 75% of all the titles. I didn't hear back from this person and the email address that they had contacted me with was "full" and couldn't accept any more incoming emails. About a week after that, I got home from work one day and my pc wouldn't connect to the internet. I went through the normal DIY procedures and then contacted AT&T/Roadrunner, my ISP. They ran a couple of online tests and told me my modem was no good. I replaced the modem and still nothing. I called my ISP back and they said there was nothing else they could recommend. I have a grade school friend who manages another ISP, a small local deal but they had DSL and he said it was pretty fast so I switched and still couldn't get the pc to connect to the internet. So my friend comes over with all his test equipment and after about an hour he drops the device on my desk and asked me some questions about my activity before it stopped connecting and I told him what I could remember and when I got to the part about the email from the person wanting the list, he said OK, stop right there and tell me why he wanted a list of your music so I tell him about the iTunes ordeal and he asks me if I had any Metallica songs that I had gotten from Napster and I said yeah, like 4 of the old ones from Kille em All. He said you are going to need a new motherboard. I asked him why and he said that the person who wanted the list got the serial number for your motherboard banned from being able to log onto the internet ever again and that I was probably going to be contacted by the FBI or an agent designated by them to be interviewed about my use of Napster and that I could forget about any chance of ever getting those mp3s back. So I start researching that stuff and start panicking as I'm reading these cases of people getting sued by the RIAA for hundreds of thousands of dollars for having a few copyright protected files on their hard drives that were downloaded illegally through Napster with Metallica being at the forefront of the whole movement. I also had to replace my whole pc because it was a gateway and they used funky motherboards that were designed to only fit into gateway cases. Nothing else came of the mp3 situation, I didn't get contacted by anyone or get sued but after deciding to build my new pc from standard parts in a generic case, I also decided to get back into vinyl and collect my music that way. From what I can gather is iTunes turned me in after I canceled my subscription and since there were no mp3s on my hard drive by the time I was contacted and they fried my mono serial number there wasn't much of a case so they must have just let it go for bigger fish. So even though iTunes may have saved me from a huge lawsuit, they still scumbed me and then shortly after that I read a headline article in the WSJ about Apple boasting a 9 billion dollar profit for whatever quarter had just closed and it made me sick so I've sworn them off and they have not nor will they ever get a red cent out of my pocket again.