DRM is mostly a product of the greedy music execs and not really Apple. Apple's iTunes has all that content because it has such a PITA DRM system in place. You'd think these music execs were fighting to keep more money in the music artist's pockets but nope, the music artist barely even gets a percentage of sales for their music. Not that I'm defending Apple since they're part of that greedy system, but the music execs are some of the biggest scumbags out there.
Blackthantos, have your G/F try what is illustrated below. With Apple it's not just a simple process of cutting your music library from one computer to another. You actually have to "Authorize computer" on the new computer or hard drive as well.
In my case the computer's hard drive didn't crash, but the ipod's. I had to send it in and they replaced the hard drive and battery. After I got it back, my music purchases were fine, but itunes didn't recognize me as the legitimate owner of my videos. I tried deauthorizing and reauthorizing, I wiped all authorized devices and added them back and no help. After a week of emailing back and forth with itunes support (all they did was keep sending me links to their support pages, which I had already gone through but tried again anyway), they said the solution was to repurchase my video content. I asked if they would credit my account to do that and I was told that they could not do that, that it would be up to me to foot the bill. I was ticked to say the least since I had already purchased the content once (around $75 worth), and their program was causing the problem. I was told that was all they could do.
Shortly after apple and I parted ways, I had to reinstall windows. I started with a new hard drive, so it was a clean install, installed itunes, logged in, authorized my computer, then after adding all my music and videos back in I connected my ipod. Same as before, music was fine, I could watch my videos in itunes (though it asked me with each video I opened to authorize myself as the owner), but I couldn't transfer my videos to my ipod no matter what I did, because it said I was not the authorized owner even after seconds before reauthorizing myself.
What really makes me angry is if they had simply credited my account so I could repurchase my content, I would probably still be a customer today. At that time I was still looking forward to Verizon getting the iphone. But they got greedy and didn't support a customer. Since then when I have looked for videos, sometimes itunes is the only one that has them. But after my experience I will not even consider getting it from them.
It's not like I had a device that was out of warranty and I demanded it be fixed, this was for the content that I had purchased. I had actually bought the extended warranty and the repair to my ipod was taken care of through it. I upheld my end of the deal, if they whould've upheld their's, either by actually finding the cause of the issue or making it right by allowing me to repurchase the content without charge, they would've still had a loyal customer.
