“With their $1 billion lawsuit against Apple Inc. on thin ice, consumer attorneys found their new lead client — an amateur skater who holds an eight-year grudge against the iPod maker for making it a hassle to listen to the tango and Hungarian music she loves,” Karen Gullo and Robert Burnson report for Bloomberg.
“The other thing Barbara Ragan Bennett, 65, brings to the case is her iPod Nano bought in 2006. That’s the most important credential to serve as lead plaintiff on behalf of 8 million consumers in a case alleging that Apple tried to maintain a monopoly on digital music from 2006 to 2009,” Gullo and Burnson report. “The two previous lead plaintiffs were taken off the case after Apple questioned whether their iPod purchases qualified them to be representatives in the class-action case.”
“On the stand with the jury absent, Bennett described herself yesterday as a consultant and ice dancer from Marshfield, Massachusetts. She said she e-mailed the judge to volunteer herself as class representative for the case after reading that the lead plaintiffs had been withdrawn,” Gullo and Burnson report. “She said that after buying her Nano in 2006, she couldn’t always find the “rare music” she enjoys, including tango and Hungarian, for sale on iTunes. As a result, she had to buy CDs of the music and copy it onto her laptop before syncing with her Nano, she said.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: At this point, Apple’s attorneys have to be waiting for the “judge” to exclaim, “Smile! You’re on ‘Candid Camera.'”
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Bob” for the heads up.]
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So iTunes is supposed to sell *every* music known to mankind?
Did any other digital music store offered those rare tangoes?
iTunes is required by law to sell every tango, mango, groovy movie and cookie book going back 10,000,000 years and forever more, from each and every business.
Oh, wait. No, they are not.
She should also sue Apple because the only way she could play her old vinyl records on the iPod was by converting them to .mp3
Sounds like she is not in the class.
For her to have a claim, need needs to have purchased the Tango music on Rhapsody, and tried to side (hack) it to her iPod. Buying a CD and loading it into her computer is exactly how everyone did it and is expected to do, even to this day.
AGAIN, complete BS.
“She said that after buying her Nano in 2006, she couldn’t always find the “rare music” she enjoys, including tango and Hungarian, for sale on iTunes. As a result, she had to buy CDs of the music and copy it onto her laptop before syncing with her Nano, she said.”
Hey Barbara Ragan Bennett the issue is not about finding and buying rare music in iTunes but inability to play digital music purchased from other providers on iPod players.
I-d-i-o-t-s !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I knew it. I should have called them when I couldn’t get my Polka Greatest Dance Hits Ever on my iPod! I may still have time to get in on this! 😜
Yea, she’s a gold digger…… Uh uh uh….
Hell, if those ambulance chasers paid me enough I’d be their lead plaintiff. But, I bought an iPod in 2005 and an iPhone in 2007 & 08 & 09, and iTunes music in all of those years, so I don’t know if I qualify or not.
A fancy dancer! That should do the trick all right. Oh, and a consultant too…
This must be a joke !!!…?
Desperation, if accurately reported. I thought the original suit involved RealNetworks! She’s probably never heard of RealNetworks. And she actually WAS able to he move her music from CD’s onto the iPod in a two step process, which is cumbersome but hardly constitutes damages. In fact, it’s the same process we use today in getting music on CD’s onto an iPod. Copy ’em to iTunes and sync. What other method could she have used in 2006? As far as I know, the iPod has never carried the software to extract music directly from CD’s.
What a legal joke. I’ll bet Apple’s attorneys will sleep well tonight.
yes! her situation has nothing to do with the alleged damages. and she emailed the judge no less! so now the judge is on record as having recruited plaintiffs for the case.
I wonder how the Judge will be compensated for her assistance to the plaintiffs?
Considering her age and that CD’s have being available for about 30 years also that tango is anything but new, my guess is that she already had that music on CD’s while iTunes ability to rip CD’s actually saved her some money as she didn’t need to repurchase her music as she probably had to do when CD’s replaced vinyl records
If this suit is not thrown out of court in microscopically short order, the entire American legal system will be held up for ever more as THE prime exemplar of crass and utter stupidity.
The only people who will benefit are the bastard lawyers, whose venal and rapacious actions have brought the entire profession into disrepute.
For shame!
=:~)
The legal profession was already somewhat disreputable, but now they are behaving like organ-grinders with monkeys trained as pick-pockets.
In the long run, this is about the Trial Lawyers long sought goal of just eliminating the need for plaintiffs at all. . . skip those vexatious irritants and allow THEM to choose who to sue directly. Then watch how much money they can extort extract from the economy for deserving lawyers everywhere. . .
Hey, my old eight track tapes did not fit into the cassette player in my 94 Mazda pickup truck. Do I have a valid case? I too want some money that’s owed me for my suffering.
Ha! Perfect! And you can sue Mazda *and* the maker of the cassette player.
But I just want to be your lawyer. Doesn’t even matter if the case has legs or not – I’ll get paid somehow. Sorry about you.
Tom, I think you too have a winnable case..my eight track cartridges will NOT fit in the USB outport of my iPod. I have contacted the law firm of Dewey, Cheatham & Howe to handle a class action suit. Senior law partner, Moe Howard, promises an expeditious and rewarding result. If you’re interested please contact:
Moe Howard, Senior Partner
Dewey, Cheatham & Howe
℅ Columbia Studios
Hollywood CA 91601
My eight-track of Mel Tillis’s “Southern Rain” did make a kinda stuttering sound though.
botty . . . again, I catch you talking to yourself. I know the nice people on this site can’t stand you but there is no reason to shame the family name by talking to yourself nearly every post.
Hold on, hold on. . . 8 Tracks were superior to cassettes. . . you never had to rewind and they didn’t hiss. . . no techy Dolby sound reduction needed to play them. And don’t you miss the exciting streamers coming from he player occasionally when you pulled them out? Oh, wait, you got streamers with cassettes too.
Okay, I was going to comment that since the original two “lead” plaintiffs were dismissed due to not actually qualifying for the suit, Apple should call for a poll of the other 8 million people to reassess whether or not they qualified, as well. After all, if the originals and their attorneys were confused about the issues, who can say about the other 8 million? But then we get the doozy of the new lead having to rip CDs into iTunes, which was hardly the idea behind this lawsuit in the first place. Insanity!
Oh the cubes of justice are going to spin round smoothly on this one.
9 years to get to trial??? Do these cases not come with an expiration date?
And all the time these poor people have been suffering immensely.
It’s about time the plantiffs and their lawyers came onto the streets and chanted “Hands Up”
I thought they were arguing that you couldn’t buy rival music and put it on your iPod, now it’s you couldn’t buy Hungarian Tango music on iTunes?
I very much doubt that her music was available on rival download sites in the US at the time so where is the damage to the consumer?
First we had Judge Lucy (the complete dumbshit) Koh and now we have this moron. There is no class action suit here. Just a bunch of blackberry lunatic attorneys trying to get a paycheck. They are pretending they are relevant. Stupid Judges are worse than stupid economists, and that is not easy to do.
This judge is trying to make sure the idiot lawyers get a pay check.
The idiot dancer got her music onto her iPod. That means no harm, no foul. Let’s see ya get your dumb music on your blackberry, sweetie.
There is no evidence that the Judges of America are qualified to do anything. Refer to current trials for mass murder by mentally ill fools. And said fools get to keep running around for years, while they manipulate the legal system. Guess who is winning that race. Yep. A big flock of them just went over.
No wonder Apple lawyers want to fight this case on it’s “merits” instead of getting it dropped. It figures – in a case where the plaintiff keeps changing, why not the defendant? The old dancer has already replaced the iPod with iTunes. Before we know it, MDN might be hauled in for misleading these knobs into the Apple ecosystem! (Was MDN even around in those days?)
Strange days. We had an old values-based Senator yesterday doing a Shiite self-whipping, announcing to the world from America’s top chamber that Americans are torturers and all-round bad people. Those angels of ISIS will probably now be clamoring for life-size posters of Dianne Feinstein. They’ll place severed heads at her alter.
As signed by Dwight D Eisenhower, US Military Code of Conduct, Article V, Section C:
“c. It is a violation of the Geneva Convention to place a prisoner under physical or mental duress, torture or any other form of coercion in an effort to secure information.”
Wait. So the iPod supported her music without prejudice if she had a CD to rip and load via iTunes, but some titles she desired were absent on the iTunes Store? But the iPod was ok with “foreign” content, regardless of the fact that it was not purchased through Apple? So she’s suing?!?
oh dear did she say she had to “buy” her music ???
re “As a result, she had to buy CDs of the music and copy it onto her laptop before syncing with her Nano”
So she could listen to her beloved music on her Nano, and did.
Did RealNetworks or Raphsody sell digital Hungarian music that she was unable to listen to on her Nano ? If she can’t prove that then she is as much use as a chocolate teapot.
The whole idea behind iTunes at that time was to either buy it from the store or Rip it into I tunes via a Mac or PC. And note Apple had made a version of iTunes for PC to ensure that anyone could use an iPod and not just Mac owners.
This ‘Billion Dollar’ class action is lawyer(s) seeking free money from a mutli-billion dollar company.
How about the lawyers make themselves useful and go after the banks and loan companies who did real damage to poor people buying houses in 2006. That might just make us all feel they aren’t all just leeches.
She had to rip her CDs into iTunes, and sync them to her iPod? What horror! How tortuous! Clearly Apple must give the lawyers a gajillion dollars.
——RM
WITH HER BARE HANDS!!!
….and don’t forget in 2007 the headline message by Apple was
Rip Mix Burn
Ripping was the first step in the process whether you had an iPod or used a CD player in your car.