Bagel Belly Blog

iTunes and DRM

Since Friday evening I've been erasing and restoring my powerbook, to clean out some of the cruft, undo some of my early mistakes as a newbie mac user, and find out just how good my backups are. It's been quite an interesting process, and I'll write more about it when it's finished. What I want to ranttalk about today is iTunes DRM.
When Paul's cat and floor conspired to give his computer a sudden bumpy death, he found out the hard way that you cannot simply download purchased music from the iTunes Music Store again. If you don't have a backup of the music, you have to buy it all a second time (or third time if you'd switched from vinyl, or fourth if you lost the CD, or fifth if you're REALLY unlucky). Needless to say, I made absolutely certain I had a backup of the songs I'd bought, all 69 of them. I'm surprised it's that many... that'll be the insidious nature of iTMS I guess. Anyway, I had no plans to give the moribund and corrupt recording industry another £55.
For the sake of argument, let's say I backed them up by dragging my music folder onto an external hard disk, as a regular user might do. (It was actually rsync magic, but the results are the same).
One of the first things that got copied back on to my freshly-wiped powerbook was my iTunes Music folder. Copying to and from an external disk seems like a pretty normal operation for your 'average' user to do, right? I was quite pleased when a cursory glance showed all my music, playlists, playcounts etc. were there, seemingly intact. Until this morning, when I plugged my iPod back in ...
Hello, what's this?

Some songs are not authorised to play on this computer? Well... uh... how come? I've logged back in to iTMS with the same username and password as before ... it's the same laptop as before, it's an identical copy of my music directory... this is a little confusing.
I took a look at the Apple support site, and it has this useful article on authorising and deauthorising a computer. Basically:

To authorize a computer to play songs or spoken word content purchased from the iTunes Music Store, select the item (in your library or the Purchased Music playlist), and click the Play button.

If the computer is already authorized to play songs purchased using your account, the song plays.

If the computer has not yet been authorized to play songs purchased using your account, you're asked to enter your ID and password. Enter the ID and password for the account with which the song was purchased.

That makes sense. I tried it, and it worked (with a caveat I'll come to later). However, there's a sting in the tail:

If you've already authorized five other computers to play your music purchases, you won't be able to play the songs on this computer until you deauthorize one of the already authorized computers.

So I've already lost one life, because even though this is the same machine with the same music collection, because I reinstalled without knowing this, I've had to authorise it a second time.

And this happens even if you are working from a backup. Apple says you can truly feel good about buying from the iTunes Music Store, but I'm beginning to wonder. I could be mistaken - maybe my method of backing up was at fault? I took a look at Apple's information on backing up your music files in iTunes, and they say:

Be sure to make regular backups of your music files (in your iTunes Music folder) by copying them to an external hard disk or other media. Otherwise, if your hard disk becomes damaged or you lose any of the music you've purchased, you'll have to buy any purchased music again to rebuild your library.

Right, so exactly what I did, and yet here I am fighting with DRM. The backup page has no warning about the cumbersome authorising or deauthorising process. And the ironic thing? The track in question which alerted me to this problem - REM's Around the Sun Redux - was a free download from the store, a promo for the new REM album. So what we've found out so far is that even though you make correct backups, even though you purchase and use music legitimately, you may eventually be unable to play the music you have legally purchased. Seems the only way to guarantee you can always play it is to own one of those shiny plastic things.
Aside: my record company lawyer friend would tell me here it's about making trade-offs and it's the price you pay for cheaper music and easy downloads. My response to that is that actually, no, it's just another way the record companies are going to try and make money out of us, whilst limiting our rights as much as possible. I'd probably swear a bit during the conversation, too, but she's used to that.

Of course, there's one more problem. The first song I ever bought from iTMS.

This was the first song I also removed the DRM from, to allow it to play on the linux laptop plugged in to my hifi. iTunes will not let me re-authorise this song. It turns out that the iTunes 4.7.1 update breaks tracks with broken DRM. There's a workaround for scrubbing non-working DRM files, but you know what? The copy of "These Words" that I downloaded via Limewire works just fine, so I think I'll just play that instead.
What have I learnt today?

• Backing up my data is not enough when it's DRMed. You don't own it, you're just borrowing it for five installations.
• Playing illegally-obtained music is a whole lot easier. As many people recommend, buy the songs on the iTunes Music Store and then download the MP3s through the file-sharing networks.
• If I'm going to unlock the DRM on my tracks, I also need to convert them to mp3 and remove any trace of the DRM.
• I should stick with buying CDs.

I hope this all serves as a warning for naive iTMS users out there.