First, they got their lawyers to hunt down the guy who created the great iTunes plug-in called iPod Download, and got him to take it down. Then they got their engineers to "improve" iTunes so that it will support iPod Photo, and along the way, conveniently kill iPod Download from working with iTunes.
via Boing Boing
Excerpt:
If you're an iPod user, you would have done well to have availed yourself of iPod Download, an OS X app that made it easy to move your music from your iPod to your Mac. Of course, Apple hated that poor little app, so it was sometimes hard to find, as Apple devoted expensive laywer-hours to shutting down all the sites that were hosting copies of it. Of course, there's more dough where that came from -- they'll just pass the cost on to you in your next iPod.
As it turns out, you're shit-outta-luck even if you managed to snag a copy. That's because Apple just devoted some expensive engineering hours to updating iTunes to version 4.7, with the "improvement" of breaking iPod Download. That's right -- Apple's spending money seeing to it that features are removed from your iPod. Thanks a whole lot, Apple.
