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 278: Ben Waldman on Gander Social and the Challenges of Building a Sovereign Social Network
byMichael Geist

August 10, 2026
Michael Geist
Search Results placeholder
Michael Geist on Substack
Recent Posts
Digital Trade Alignment: What May Be in Play in the Canada-U.S. Trade Deal
TMU Picks Damage Control Over Fixing the Damage: Behind Its Shameful Response to the Devastating Benotto Report on Campus Antisemitism
Thanks For Joining the Movement: French Constitutional Council Strikes Down Kids’ Social Media Ban
Denial, Hate, and Silence: The Three Responses to Overwhelming Evidence of Canada’s Campus Antisemitism Crisis
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 278: Ben Waldman on Gander Social and the Challenges of Building a Sovereign Social Network

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.