OSNews

For me, when there are viable alternatives, I always vote with my wallet when a vendor tries to put ridiculous restrictions on my usage of the product I purchased (fair and square) from them - restrictions that only benefit the vendor, and have nothing to with public health and safety (as Thom pointed out).

I go to their competitors who do not put those restrictions on me.

For instance, like so many other people, I have an iPod. At first, I did plenty of purchases from iTunes (along with ripping a bunch of stuff from my extensive CD collection). But once I discovered that many of the tunes purchased from iTunes could not be played in anything but iTunes or my iPod, I stopped all purchases from iTunes.

If not playing music on my iPod, I generally prefer playing the music on programs like Songbird, aTunes, Banshee, and others, over iTunes (the program), because I find iTunes to be bulkly, slow, and ugly.

So now any MP3 downloads I purchase are entirely from either Amazon or eMusic (both have zero DRM and will play on anything).

I do realize that Apple recently signed an agreement with the big 4 record companies where they do not have to have DRM. But I've seen nothing when perusing iTunes that indicates the downloads don't have the previous restrictions.

Until Apple makes it crystal clear that downloads from iTunes come with no restrictions for what the tunes are played on or with what software, I will never purchase anything from iTunes.

It's that simple.