Jun 10 2011
Sydney Morning Herald – Apple Cracks Down on Sharing iTunes Purchases
Adam Turner over at the Sydney Morning Herald writes about how Apple in iTunes 10.3 disabled some sort of backwards way of using someone else’s iTunes account to copy a purchase onto your phone. The one caveat was that you had to sign in again to get any updates. With 10.3 and a US account this is no longer possible. While Apple has made it okay to authorize 5 computers and more portable devices, they have never really made it possible for couples who marry to merge their accounts without having to ditch one and repurchase anything missing on the other. Your other option was to burn to CD your music and re-rip it back. Never a problem when I was married as neither of us had anything from Apple and we still used CD’s and mp3′s. It was simple to combine our music empire into one collection and when we did move into Apple’s iGarden of devices we just used the same account for our family.
That brings up another issue. Family accounts where your children move on to their own households, there again is no real process to allow them to separate their music collection without going the rip route. In this case it really is more of a thing where the parents likely do not listen to the kids music and forcing them to repurchase their songs really sticks it to a fledgeling who’s trying to make their way in the world.
It’s going to be a larger issue as more of our society moves into the digital media age. Nobody wants to throw away potentially thousands of dollars of music when they leave their parents house, and it will not only apply to Apple, digital movies would be another issue if they’re tied to Apple’s iTunes or a Microsoft platform.