iTunes DRM Sticks it to Another User

[Chris Gohlke]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.itwriting.com/blog/2647-itunes-user-has-account-hacked-loses-access-to-his-own-purchases.html' target='_blank'>http://www.itwriting.com/blog/2647-...-purchases.html</a><br /><br /></div><p>iTunes account gets hacked. &nbsp;Credit card company notes the activity and initiates a dispute with Apple. &nbsp;</p><p><em>"This is where it gets really nasty. Apple closed the compromised iTunes account and de-authorised all his purchases &ndash; not only the ones the fraudster grabbed, but everything he had bought over a period of 6 years."</em></p><p>The user ended up giving up without getting a resolution. &nbsp;They'd upgraded much of their material to the non-DRM version through iTunes Plus and after hitting one too many roadblocks decided it wasn't worth pursuing getting the rest of their paid for media released. &nbsp;Just goes to reinforce my practice of not buying any thing that I don't fully own. &nbsp;I've never purchased from iTunes and 99% of my on-line music purchases have been through Amazon's music store.</p>

[The Yaz]

To be fair about iTunes, it's been easy to deal with the DRM as long as you take appropriate precautions.

Whenever I or my kids use up a iTunes gift card we take the purchased folder and burn a CD as a backup. Once it's done, iTunes informs you that you have a CD in the drive; do you wish to import? Click yes and it asks if you wish to overwrite the song in your library. Click yes and say bye to the DRM.

I also take the precaution of ripping the songs as MP3 so I'm certain it will play on all of my media sources.

And I end up with a physical backup to boot.

Steve:cool:

[Chris Gohlke]

The feel I got from the article was that the bigger problem was with video. There is not a workaround for that, at least not that I'm aware of. Also, what about if you did have legitimately purchased apps and then ran in to a similar problem are you then also out of luck on those as well?

[Janak Parekh]

Terrible story. For what it's worth, though, by-and-large I've heard that the iTunes folks are pretty responsive to service requests, much more so than the Zune folks. Not sure why they aren't about this specific case, but general advice to all: use different, nonobvious passwords for all of your sites!

--janak