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Comment by jackowayed | Hacker News Reader

But why? What's the difference to them between redownloading it on your new phone and syncing with your computer to get your books? The bandwidth costs?

And it works fine for apps. I can buy an app over the air, delete it, and redownload it for free, all without my computer ever being involved.

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I think they are trying to make it hard for 100 people to share one iTunes account and "redownload" the purchased content onto their respective iPods.

except they have limitations on the amount of devices which can be authorized. And this is the rip mix burn company who didn't care in the past. Why would they care now, most users will just make a cd out of the music anyway to pass it to friends.

Contracts with publishers.

Is that even possible? I don't use iTunes, but I thought there was some limit on the number of devices you have registered at a time.

I look at Steam as what iTunes should be. With Steam allowing me to download my games, I doubt Apple is suffering because of download costs. I'm pretty sure it's a holdover from their DRM-laden days.

There's an FAQ somewhere on Apple's site which I ran across awhile back that said something to that effect. The deal to require customers to re-buy lost files was part of how they got all the labels to allow the store to even exist in the first place back in the day. Given that music no longer has DRM, this one remaining concession is probably going to be even harder to get dropped because it's one of the only "protections" that the music store offers to the labels now.

You are probably right about this being a concession to the music labels, but that's just music. Not everything in the iTunes store has to work that way. For instance, apps that you buy can be re-downloaded at no charge.

When it comes to apps, Apple is the publisher. They make all the rules and can do as they like.

For music and books Apple has to negotiate contracts with publishers who likely demand certain conditions in return for their content being made available on the various iTunes stores.

Considering Apple's consumer-friendly position on the repeated downloading of apps, it seems reasonable to guess that forcing consumers to pay to redownload books, music and videos is a requirement imposed on them by the content publishers.

I've long suggested that iTunes isn't a media manager as much as it is DRM Software.

Absolutely. Steam's model is great, and the ability to install a fresh new computer, whack on steam and have my whole game library available is a huge incentive for me to keep buying games this way. When I could recently install Steam on my Mac as well, and find games I already owned available cross-platform, well, it's icing on the cake.

Charging for re-downloads is just greedy, and smacks of the bad old Norton Antivirus days. The first time they pulled that on me, I decided I'd never buy one of their products again, and I didn't.

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