Sounds like you're saying that when you buy a song from a service like iTunes, you're buying the bytes that land on your hard drive, which are then your responsibility to backup or otherwise preserve.
In my opinion, when you buy a song from a service like iTunes, I'm buying the right to own a song - legally. I just don't see the logic in saying that that ownership expires b/c of some calamity, such as hardware failure.
Equating breaking a physical piece of merchandise with forfeiting your ownership of something as ephemeral as a song is way off base. The whole point is that once you buy the song or album, the content is yours. That can't be related to a physical object. Apple needs to do something to "fix" that aspect of its model. As the earlier poster mentioned, they have a record of the music you own...seems simple enough to me.
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Sounds like you're saying that when you buy a song from a service like iTunes, you're buying the bytes that land on your hard drive, which are then your responsibility to backup or otherwise preserve. In my opinion, when you buy a song from a service like iTunes, I'm buying the right to own a song - legally. I just don't see the logic in saying that that ownership expires b/c of some calamity, such as hardware failure.
Equating breaking a physical piece of merchandise with forfeiting your ownership of something as ephemeral as a song is way off base. The whole point is that once you buy the song or album, the content is yours. That can't be related to a physical object. Apple needs to do something to "fix" that aspect of its model. As the earlier poster mentioned, they have a record of the music you own...seems simple enough to me.