Leader: iTunes ain't what it used to be

A year ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iTunes Music Store, positioning it as the people's legal alternative for downloading music on the internet.

The record labels approved of it, yet it offered a relaxed copyright protection policy. You paid 99 cents per song, but could transfer them to your iPod, burn them onto as many CDs as you want, and play them on up to three Macs.

It was no Napster. But people liked it, and a year later 70 million songs have been bought at the site, says Apple.

Take a closer look, though, and you'll see that today's iTunes is not the iTunes we once knew. The newest version, introduced Wednesday in the US (we won't have iTunes or the mini iPod in Europe until later this year - thanks, Steve), featured some concessions to the music industry, such as limiting the number of times you can burn a playlist onto a CD from 10 to seven (the restriction to 10 from no limit came earlier this year).

Even more disappointing, the latest iTunes disables MyTunes, a third-party app that allowed you to save songs streamed over a network to the hard drive of a different computer than the one they were originally downloaded to. And once you upgrade to the new version you can no longer share music with computers running older versions.

Apple positioned the MyTunes change as a bug fix, but it sounds like backpedalling to us.

True, Jobs said iTunes would be label-friendly from the beginning. But over time the concessions are starting to outweigh the improvements for music buyers, which have come mostly in the form of usability tweaks.

Perhaps Jobs has hit the same wall everyone else has - having to play nice with the RIAA and friends in order to maintain a large enough variety of music to please subscribers.

Speaking of the RIAA - The hunt for music pirates is still on. What, going after 5-year-olds this time? Nah, looks like it's sticking to the university-aged set. A new round of copyright lawsuits brings the total number of downloaders sued to almost 2,500. Just the thing for business - alienate the age group that once made you rich.