Did you know that you can only “deauthorize all” computers you have connected to the iTunes Store once per year? I didn’t.
I just found this out the hard way: For some reason, Deb’s laptop, which was authorized to play content from my iTS account, lost its authorization. When I went to re-authorize it, it claimed that I had already used all five authorizations. Of course, it was correct, I had used them all, but one of them should have been that laptop.
I then tried deauthorizing all, to get back to a clean state and it told me that I could not do this until April of next year.
Come on guys! First off, it doesn’t make sense to put any constriants on this: If you tell me I can play the music on five computers, then let me pick them. It should be about simultaneous use of the content, not associations with particular machines.
I can’t even figure out why you would do this. If I was smart, and just authorized whichever machine I was in front of when I wanted to play my content on it, and then remembered (*sigh*) to deauthorize it when I was done, couldn’t I play it on any machine I want? I wonder, do they prevent frequent repeated authorizations too? Given that I’m already in a screwed up state, I’m not going to test it.
Could it just be that their DRM is so lousy that if they leak too many keys too quickly, someone will be able to crack it?
Bah!
[Aside: Why do I have to deauthorize all anyway? When I sync my Macs with .Mac they give me a nice GUI that lists all machines that are currently sync’ing to that account, and let me pick ones to disconnect. That is what the iTS store should have too. Apple, you’re days of owning the monopoly on this stuff really are almost over. It’s time to start actually making your customers happy (and yes, you can add “re-downloading anything you have already purchased for the cost of the bandwidth” to the must-have list).]
I suspect that the real reason they prevent you from deauthorizing frequently is that — shhh! it’s a secret 😉 — they usually don’t check the authorization when you use the content. After the last time I deauthorized all, it was quite a while before it noticed that I had forgotten to reauthorize my G5 server.
If you are going to run in that mode, and I’m not arguing that you shouldn’t, then you need to watch the patterns of behavior that people are using to detect who the real abusers are, instead of pissing off your legitimate customers.
To be clear: It’s time to burn CDs of every thing I’ve downloaded and re-import them. I won’t accept being treated like I’m a criminal.