Whoever is at fault, this seems an unhealthy state of affairs for the labels themselves. Haven't they been complaining that CDs, with their lack of copying restrictions, make file-swapping too easy? So why would they want to steer customers away from digital downloads with built-in copy controls?

The copy controls in iTunes, however, can be a sore point in their own right. Apple's generous usage rules, which allow nearly unlimited burning of iTunes AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) files to audio CDs, don't let you do much with the AAC files themselves.

You can't dump 150 AACs on a data CD-RW and listen to that in a compatible car or home stereo. You can't copy them to your handheld organizer, unless you burn them to an audio CD and then convert the tracks again to MP3s. You can't stream them from your computer to your stereo over a home network.

None of those things is possible, because currently the only device besides a Mac OS X, Windows 2000 or Windows XP computer that can play an iTunes AAC file is the iPod. Despite many requests by other companies to open up this format for use on other devices, Apple acts as though the iPod and variants of it (such as the licensed copy that Hewlett-Packard will sell later this year) are enough.

It may very well have other devices up its sleeve, but the company, as usual, refuses to talk about them. That's the problem right there -- Apple wants customers to advance into this digital-music future without a map. In so doing, it's showing itself at its least attractive: resolutely proprietary and secretive to a fault.

The market, however, has a way of solving these problems. Earlier this month, an open-source program called PlayFair appeared online. It allows an iTunes customer who owns either an iPod or a Windows machine authorized to play his or her purchases to remove the copy controls from those AAC files. (PlayFair does nothing to songs you don't own; it's useless to thieves.)

I tried this program on a purchased song and found it worked as promised, making an unprotected copy of the AAC file that included the original title/track/artist info and album-cover art. A program like this makes my iTunes purchases even more valuable to me; it's too bad that I had to break the music store's terms of service to do this.

Apple has fired off cease-and-desist letters to sites hosting this software, which soon took it offline (most recently Friday). This whack-a-mole game may go on for a while, as Apple's lawyers pursue PlayFair around the Web.

But the best way for Apple to beat this program is to make it obsolete. Let buyers listen to their iTunes files on more than just iPods, and they won't need to tinker with third-party software. They might even stomach the occasional higher price on an album.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com.