Just recently, a Europe-wide consumer protection program has been announced, which aims to ensure consumers have the ability to return online purchased products for a refund if they are not satisfied, regardless of the country of purchase. The lead architect of the program has hinted that the Apple iTunes service may be affected also, where consumers could be entitled to "return" a song for a refund if they are dissatisfied. An example would be where a customer purchases a song from iTunes and only then discovers that their MP3 player cannot play the song due to the lack of interoperability. At present, iTunes does not offer any means of getting a refund for unwanted purchases.
So far, the government of the non-EU country Norway has given Apple a deadline of October 1st to update iTunes to comply with the country's interoperability laws. Even though it looks like little is going on so far to fix this issue, the new potential issue of having to allow refunds is likely to be another challenge for Apple's FairPlay DRM technology. For example, if a customer decides to return a song within the cooling off period, there would need to be a way of taking the song off the consumer, such as revoking the license.
From what I can see, a drawback of allowing songs to be returned would be a risk of users abusing the system where they purchase an album, write it to an Audio CD (which iTunes allows) and then returning it. On the other hand, this is little different to doing the same with a physical CD purchase, but at least for those who do not realise that DRM systems are not interoperable, they may be able to get a refund for their purchases and buy the music on another store that is compatible with their player.
Further information on this can be read on BetaNews here.
