Big Surprise: Loud Music Can Damage Your Hearing

Here comes the first of what will likely be many such lawsuits to allege hearing loss from the use of iPods:

A Louisiana man claims in a lawsuit that Apple's iPod music player can cause hearing loss in people who use it.

Apple has sold more than 42 million of the devices since they went on sale in 2001, including 14 million in the fourth quarter last year. The devices can produce sounds of more than 115 decibels, a volume that can damage the hearing of a person exposed to the sound for more than 28 seconds per day, according to the complaint.

The iPod players are "inherently defective in design and are not sufficiently adorned with adequate warnings regarding the likelihood of hearing loss," according to the complaint, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., on behalf of John Kiel Patterson of Louisiana.

The suit, which Patterson wants certified as a class-action, seeks compensation for unspecified damages and upgrades that will make iPods safer. Patterson's suit said he bought an iPod last year, but does not specify whether he suffered hearing loss from the device.

Patterson does not know if the device has damaged his hearing, said his attorney, Steve W. Berman, of Seattle. But that's beside the point of the lawsuit, which takes issue with the potential the iPod has to cause irreparable hearing loss, Berman said.

"He's bought a product which is not safe to use as currently sold on the market," Berman said. "He's paying for a product that's defective, and the law is pretty clear that if someone sold you a defective product they have a duty to repair it."

An Apple Computer Inc. spokeswoman, Kristin Huguet, declined to comment.

I have an iPod, and I also have a little safety device on mine called a "volume control". Unfortunately for Apple, the presence of a volume control will not prevent hundreds or thousands of these lawsuits from being filed, and given that nobody has personal responsibility for anything these days, many will probably be successful.

Every now and then I'll find myself driving next to some idiot who has his rap music blasting from his car and shaking the ground with the pounding bass. The driver has no problem inflicting his poor choice in "music" on the rest of the world.

I just smile knowingly that some day soon, this moron will be deaf as post.