iTunes is Apple's leading digital media player appliciation, introduced back in 2001, at Macworld, and besides the fact that this program is used as an interface to manage the contents on Apple's popular iPod digital media players, iTunes can connect to the iTunes Store, formerly known as the iTunes Music Store or iTMS, for purchasing digital music, videos, iPod games, television shows and movies. All good so far, but some things are not quite as they seem to be at first sight...

If you have an iPod and you're using iTunes and the iTunes Store, everything should be just fine, but let's suppose an unfortunate event: you have an expensive video iPod that gets stolen or eaten by a mad dog, and you quickly buy a cheap replacement that you intend to use for two or three months. When you try to use it to get music from the iTunes and try to copy it directly on your new player... it doesn't work just like before, does it?

Obviously, such things don't just pass unobserved, so several consumer groups from Germany, Norway, France and Finland united to create a pressure front against Apple in order to make them break the bonds between iTunes and the iPod. These groups that united are also in talks with similar authorities from Sweden, Denmark and UK, and they are trying to obtain a unified iTunes policy for Europe.

Katia Mrowka, legal expert at the Federation of German Consumer Organizations, said that "We want consumers who purchase music from the iTunes store to be able to copy that music directly to any device without having to go through several complex formatting procedures", placing interoperability and ease of use on the first place. You can't blame them for that, since the procedure offered by Apple for non-iPod users when buying iTunes music sounds like "download, burn, rip and load".

Come on! So you should download your tunes from the online store, burn them to an audio CD, rip that CD and then, finally, load the ripped tracks to your music player. To be honest, I think it would be much easier to just go to a store and buy an original audio CD, especially when you want to get existing albums and not individual tracks!

Although some steps have been already made and Apple responded to customer's inquiries, things don't look really bright, after all, since the Consumer Council of Norway, after months of battle against Apple's iTunes policy, plans to go to court if an agreement is not reached by September, so... let's wait and see but, most important of all, be careful with your iPods!