A Montreal law student has launched a class action lawsuit against Apple over inflated iPod storage claims.
Apple Faces Quebec Lawsuit Over iPod Storage Claims
October 17, 2007
Share this post
5 Comments

Law Bytes
Episode 277: Kate Robertson on the Risks That Lie Behind Canada's Unexpected Signing of the UN Cybercrime Convention
byMichael Geist

June 22, 2026
Michael Geist
Search Results placeholder
Michael Geist on Substack
Recent Posts
From CCH to ChatGPT: How Canadian Copyright Law Played the Key Role in Deciding a Leading AI Training Data Case in India
Starting Over: Court Filing Confirms the CRTC’s Streamer Contribution Decisions Are Dead With a Full Online Streaming Act Reset to Come
The Name on the Window Was Enough: The Attacks on Kiva’s and the Normalization of Antisemitic Violence in Canada
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 277: Kate Robertson on the Risks That Lie Behind Canada’s Unexpected Signing of the UN Cybercrime Convention
A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: The Trouble With Canada’s Quiet Decision to Sign the UN Cybercrime Convention

Interesting lawsuit, but I suspect that it doesn’t have any legs. If it does, then it may open up a number of other vendors such as Seagate, etc, since most storage vendors report raw rather than formatted storage size. In addition, the comment about 1 MByte meaning 1 million for some and 2**10 for others is a common issue… in computers it is common to use multiples of powers of two, however, the telecom industry uses powers of 10 (that is, 1 MByte is one million bytes) to refer to transmission speeds.
I doubt this will go anywhere. If it was a viable suit, it would target a much wider scope as all sorts of hard drives have been sold under the mismatch of unformatted and formatted capacities. Though the iPod is in many ways a specialized portable hard drive, it’s not unique in this respect.
considering that formatted capacity may actually differ based on whether it is formatted for windows or for Mac, I do agree that the lawsuit has no merit. Arguably, Apple is selling an 8GB ipod, and that’s exactly the size of the flash drive that is inside it.
i think this man is clever it has been argued in usa and the attorneys made a whole lot of money kool stuff
Again?
This type of lawsuit happens every few years. Some slimy lawyer gets dollar signs in his eyes and says \”zOMgg!@!!!11 therr not egsact to theri numberz! i need to soo!!!\”
The fact is, everyone knows that there is about a 7 or 8% discrepancy between advertised storage and actual storage because it\’s simpler to tell people that it\’s 1000 bytes/kbyte and 1000 kbytes/mbmyte; partly in keeping with the metric system and partly because of formatting overhead. Telling people that it\’s actually 1024 will just confuse them.
This is nothing but a scam for some quick money and doesn\’t stand a chance.