UnFairPlay: How Apple Screws Creative Geeks
You could say I’m a power user of Mac OS X: I know a fair bit about it and I reinstall the OS a fair bit. Sometimes I reinstall because I messed something up, but more often it’s because of HFS+ filesystem corruption or other bugs that are in Mac OS X itself. As if dealing with all these backups and re-installations was not enough, I found out recently that Apple’s FairPlay technology is tied to the OS installation, rather than a hardware ID. What this means to you is that Apple locks you out of the music you paid for if you reinstall Mac OS X on your machine. If this isn’t adding insult to injury, I don’t know what is. All this from a company that does allow you to use “protected music” with iMovie and iDVD, but not with Traktor or other 3rd party music applications.
It goes something like this:
Step One: Re-install Mac OS X
According to the Apple playbook, you are supposed to remember that you have to “deauthorize” your mac before you send it in for service or reinstall the OS. Seriously, who is going to remember to do this?
Step Two: Double Click on Your Hard Earned Music
You will be greeted by this friendly iTunes dialog that says:
This computer is not authorized to play “The Mambo Craze”. Would you like to authorize it?
What!?!!? Oh yeah, I reinstalled, I guess I have to log into my account and deauthorize that “installation”, even though that installation doesn’t even exist anymore and I’m still using the same exact laptop.
Step Three: Help!
You can click the question mark button to figure out what the heck is going on. Next you will see a pleasantly worded explanation of how fucked you are:
Well that’s all very nice. But this documentation isn’t going to help you … instead:
If you have trouble deauthorizing the computer, visit the Music Store billing support webpage at www.apple.com/support/itunes/authorization.html.
It says you can authorize “up to five computers” but really this is “up to five installations of Mac OS X.” Once you hit 5, you can deauthorize all your installations and start over again. But only once per year. Given the rate I’ve been forced to reinstall Mac OS X recently, I won’t be able to hear my music in about a month.
Link to iTunes Music Store authorization policy
Filed under: beats, osx · 4 Comments
Wouldn’t it be easier to make a “base image” of an OS X installation, e.g., using dd, and always restore that? Would that preserve whatever unique ID is tied in to the iTunes authorization? dd is a wonderfully simple tool for “return to start” type operations.
I’ve done this a couple of times myself. It really sucks and isn’t exaclty good customer service if you ask me.
I did find a way to fix the problem though, if you go to your account settings, you can choose to “Deauthourize All”. The button only appears of all of your accounts have been taken. The catch is that you can only do this once a year.
Hope this helps.
Brad