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iTunes: Don't Leave Home With Them
BadDoggie writes "Politech is reporting that your 'ownership' of music purchased from Apple's iTunes isn't what everyone considers ownership. According to the license, 'Apple may use technologies to verify' that you have not 'use[d] or attempt[d] to use the service from outside of the [United States]'. This includes Canada. Apple's 'technologies' delete the bought-and-paid-for files with no refund and no replacement when & if you leave the U.S." Update: 07/25 16:23 GMT by P : The post to Politech says the songs would "disappear," not be deleted; from the context, it seems they were merely unplayable, not deleted. Update: 07/25 21:34 GMT by M : Apple has contacted the guy, and is apparently making him happy. However, the question remains: Apple definitely doesn't want people buying new songs from outside the U.S., but do they intend to generally permit foreign users to reauthorize (in effect, retain access to) the songs they have already purchased? Apple's policy is very unclear on that point.
According to the article, you either have to volunteer the change of address info to Apple, or change the address on your credit card.
So, don't tell Apple you moved and tell your credit card company that you lost your card and need a new one.
You won't be able to purchase new music, but at least you won't lose your existing songs.
Exactly! And by the way, if you burn all your purchased songs to CD soon after you purchase them, then you don't risk losing them if your system goes ba-bye.
I'm sure those burned CDs still work in Canada.
Can you play US-bought CDs if you take them into Canada? Do the RIAA's distributors have any say in the matter?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
All sales are final etc. If it's a sale, can they unilaterally withdraw the sale based on a spurious interpretation of their terms and conditions?
although i can't condone the fact that his songs no longer work, i feel i should point out two things.
1st, no company has yet gotten authorization to distribute musical content outside the US. i'm guessing this is a record label issue.
2nd, in his case he had to reinstall everything. it asked to reverify his address, but he'd changed his address on his credit card. it was Canada now, not the US. not sure what else they could have done. if they sell songs outside of the US, they get in big trouble.
if he hadn't wiped everything, his songs would still be working today.
the "technology" they used to verify he was a US customer was his credit card billing address.
(which makes me think that someone could try a PO box in the US and then get their mail forwarded to Canada and get around the US restriciton)
Does anyone honestly believe that Apple has any REAL control of the iTunes Music Store? Agreements with the record labels had to be made. This is above all else, a money making venture, a software service to which Apple excels. And just to remind everyone, the reason we have DRM today is because people abused digital media in the past, and there is ample evidence to support that argument. Apple gives us more freedom than most, but just because it has approximately 4% market share doesn't mean the record labels give away all that freedom to the independently thinking few. When iTunes 4.0 was released, many people abused the internet file sharing feature and Apple taketh away.
Everyone talks about how the Music Industry's business model is outdated and needs to be changed to reflect the modern technology which exists around us. I think most slashdot readers would agree that classic music licensing schemes and sales models are rapidly becoming outdated.
By the same token, then, don't we need to update our expectations and buying models, as consumers? We can't insist on totally new business models without being willing to adapt to them ourselves.
It seems strange to me that everyone is so rabidly against DRM, when quite frankly anyone thinking about it comes to the conclusion that without it, some pretty ridiculous situations can result. Just because people do not, right now, ruin a band by trading its songs on services does not mean at some future point a service will become so ubiquitous and easy that it couldn't happen. Everyone forgets that the band AND the distributor need to make money.
Not to say I agree with all DRM. Oftentimes it seems like people go too far to the restrictive edge, "You can only use your music with headphones while a RIAA exec standing over you with a shotgun wards people off." I find Apple's DRM to be very reasonable, and it's also the kind of DRM that, should Apple finally kick the bucket, could be extended by another solution, even if the authorization service changes.
The poor fellow who's message is the subject of this article changed his home address to a foreign address. iTunes has no other way to tell if you're in a foreign country. I'm surprised it didn't let him authorize, but I am not surprised that it used that data to exclude him from using the iTMS. I'm sure that the situation will be rectified shortly. Apple can't afford to rampantly piss people off, and if you look at their decisions over the last 3 years you'll see in general their model has been consistant with that.
So please, Anonymous friend, instead of ceaslessly complaining about the end of an era, why not try and help shape the face of these new business models. We're at an amazing point as our society slowly beings to adopt digital media and computing on a mass scale. We've got a responsibility to make sure things turn out in a way that's equitable to everyone.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
1.) You can't reauthorize songs you purchaed if you move out of the country.
2.) You can't listen to them on anything that can't run iTunes (Macs, and soon Windows).
3.) You are dependent on the continued existence of Apple to be able to authorize the playback of them.
Yes, I know that you can burn them to CDs but those CDs will not sound as good as the ones you buy in the stores, unless you have poor hearing. In my opinion, CDs are still the best option, although copy protection threatens those of us who like to listen to them on open source
Actually I've heard that foreign students choose Canada over the US because it's supposed to be the easiest and most useful dialect of English to learn. There is significantly less variation in accent throughout Canada than any other major English country (eg: Texas vs. the Bronx, Cornwall vs. Scotland) and Canadian English is supposedly easier to understand by people with other English accents and even easier to learn for non-English speakers. I have no idea if there's truth to any of this, but I've heard it more than once...
You can. Use Apple's own API to remove the DRM from the files. There's a 23-line java progam for exporting to AIFF and there's even a suite of commandline utilities for manipulating them. I used these tools to take an album I bought yesterday to work with me, w/out resorting to using a CD. A simple search on google reveals all kinds of tools for getting to the underlying mpeg4 data. You can only use these tools on a machine authorised to open the files, but once you have the data, you can export it in a variety of formats.
t'nera semordnilap
I think the parent poster's point was that recompressing under the same codec (sans DRM) is more likely to subtract similar information to that which was originally glossed out and introduce similar artifacts, instead of a new set. MP3 artifacts are somewhat different from AAC. There's no perfect solution, but it might be a better choice than transcoding (though note that any form of digital quantisation, like CD-audio, is itself a lossy coding - when you convert to AIFF or burn to CD, you're introducing new quantisation error and loss that may not be symmetrical with the original sample).
;) Personally that's been my answer to the RIAA's paranoia lately.
With reasonable quality settings it's not going to matter to nearly everyone, as others have noted. Playing music through wires is a fudge anyway; if you want real sound, eschew reproduction and support live music near you.