I own exactly 0 Apple products, and it's gonna stay that way forever.

Maybe you could, but that wouldn't be too useful here. In this case it isn't the licensed content that's being deleted; it's other stuff that just happens to be on the drive.

I know with raw wave files if it's uncompressed you can do some interesting tricks, including having a driver that lets you use the lower 2-3 bits for data rather than for music/sound (as you wouldn't notice). That means you could create a device that hides fairly small/simple filesystem within a large wave file. (at 10Mb a minute, assume a 5 minute song at 50Mb, then take the bits for each giving you a whopping 6.6Mb-9.6Mb hidden drive), deleting that data and converting it to a lossy format would be quite annoying if it held some secret love letters I had stored away within music files, or notes and personal logs that I don't want anyone to know was there.

I remember files on my drives going mysteriously missing more than once. My GF (at the time) had Google Earth just up and disappear.

I have to agree. Apple might be a terrible company with a complete contempt for their customers and that may be fully evident in the software, but that doesn't make this DRM. It's not managing any rights, it's just doing things that nobody who is capable of independent thought would want them to do.

Indeed. They are "managing" the digital rights for content that is not even theirs. And apparently, once they have grabbed it, you can't ever restore it to a form that is usable without a subscription to their service, even the data they haven't mangled.

You may say it is a side effect of a poor DRM implementation, but it is still DRM. I won't even let you call it unintended, since according to Apple, it is very much intended. Have they thought that intention all the way through? No, probably not, because if they had they would have realized that such functionality opens them up to some rather nasty lawsuits, which they would lose if they ever went to court.

So, you don't use a mobile phone or do you have a safe alternative?

I guess it's just outdated, as I saw that exact page ages ago.
Nice "news" about Amazon, even if I'm not sure if I can trust its digital services like its physical goods.

Originally the meaning of DRM is very general. Any kind of Managing your Rights in Digital form can be considered DRM.

Then people just narrow it down to equate it to something that restrict your rights to license content.

If the original meaning is observed, even GoG has DRM because it manage the right of non paying customer from accessing the games.

Yeah I myself prefer to use Copyright. It's a even broader term. :)

But then then, it is just a very short step from defining a worm.or a virus as DRM...

Yeah, maybe so.

One of my big pet peeves is undated articles on the internet. Seems to be prevalent these days.

I might have just missed it, but I could not find a date for that article on that page. Admittedly I didn't check the source for meta tags (where I have found the date in other 'undated' articles); but I wish all articles were dated right near the top or at least above the fold.

=====

One thing I meant to say about Amazon; but forgot to in the other post, is that some of their digital music downloads are "fingerprinted" to your account.

Those that are, are identified before you purchase them (on the product page IIRC); so they can be avoided if you only want 'pure' MP3's. Not all of them are that way - and they note that it has to do with the licensing for those particular items.

You can still download and play them on any MP3 player, and move them around at will. But if you were to share them, and Amazon or the publisher were to somehow single them out, the fingerprint would allow them to be traced back to your account as the origination.

Since I don't share or upload mine, I've decided I can live with that relatively benign form of DRM.

A question, is Steve Jobs laughing or crying about this from his grave?
That's not DRM, that's vandalism. -.-

I've gotten into the habit of mentally replacing "the cloud" with "someone else's computer." It brings a lot of clarity to the situation.

Why don't you avoid this place and play on your forum or at least learn to write and spell.

+1

DRM is about restricting the free copying of data for which the DRM-creator holds a copyright, and for which the user is currently licensed. Nothing about this cloud-transfer functionality is a form of DRM. Cloud storage services universally deny you access to your files if you stop paying your subscription, so Apple isn't unique in this regard.

The only problem I'm seeing is that iTunes apparently performs sync operations on your behalf without giving you a clear enough warning.