We are now Renting Music

I am trying to put together a photo / music montage and iTunes has really made it incredibly easy to search, locate and purchase any song I could think of - the only problem is that Adobe Premiere Elements doesn't recognize the MPEG-4 Protected File format and I cannot import the song into the video.

When I try to convert the song to MP3 in iTunes, I get the above error message. Nice.

As a result, I'm stuck with a whole bunch of purchased music that I can't do anything with unless it's iTunes or iPod related. It feels like I just spent 99 cents on a bumper sticker that says "Digital Music Revolution?"

Apparently I can try to burn the songs to disc and then re-import it using another program and then they won't be write protected so I can use them. That would be great except now iTunes isn't finalizing the disc burn for me and has been churning for the last 10 minutes. Coincidence?

I don't think I'm trying to do anything illegal, and I understand all of the arguments for protecting copywrites - but something about all of this feels a little too qwerky to be practical.

Tech-nolo-gee: making life simultaneously simpler and more complex, by design.