I know too many people who did the right thing and purchased the music for their Apple device only to have the Apple device fail and be denied any recourse to recover the music they purchased without repurchasing the music. Denied access to the music they paid for they ultimately learned how to hack the system and recover their lost music files despite the DRM and refusal of Apple to help them recover or restore the files they paid for.
Whether or not the Apple tie-up is restrictive depends upon how Apple implements DRM in addition to anything else which might have otherwise allowed a tie-up to be not restrictive enough to warrant a finding of an unfair trade practice.
Personally, I’m one of the people who are of the opinion that DRM of copyrighted material is unconstitutional and contrary to natural law in the first place. But that is another long and drawn out controversy....
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What? Unless they've forgotten their iTunes username and password, which can be reset, once they've bought the music from Apple, they've bought it. Where was the music on their computers? Did they just download it, sync it to the iPod, and then erase it from the computer? These complaints about losing all their music because an iPod failed are usually bogus. The concatenation of events to lose your music requires you to also lose your computer simultaneously with the loss of your backups, and forget your iTunes account access. Perhaps that could happen in a house fire or a burglary.
But you NEVER have to rebuy anything from Apple: music, apps, iBooks, content, even if you're using them on multiple computers, as long as the device is registered under your Apple ID. Just log into the iTunes store and re-download the music you've purchased.