Okay, people, you know us by now; we practically breathe melodrama, and we live to sow the seeds of panic and angst among the unsuspecting general Mac-using populace. And yet even we aren't going to hand you this malarkey about your iTunes Music Store downloads suddenly self-destructing if you set foot outside of the United States. Faithful viewer Daniel Blanken was the first to alert us to the report that surfaced at MacNN last Friday; reportedly an iTMS customer named Declan McCullagh claimed that after moving to Canada, all of his purchased songs went up in smoke: "I've now discovered that if you leave the country, your songs may just disappear." Consternation! Uproar! Collusion between Apple and the U.S. Government to dissuade citizens from moving to other, lesser lands!

Of course, if you actually follow the link provided at MacNN to the original report, the affected customer wasn't Declan McCullagh at all; Declan just runs the list to which actual affected iTMS customer Shawn Yeager originally posted his complaint. In addition to missing this minor detail, MacNN's chosen headline, "iTMS songs won't play outside U.S.," seems needlessly alarmist (that's our job, dagnabbit!), since that's not what Shawn's complaint says at all. It's not that iTMS songs contain amazing new software-only global positioning technology and immediately overwrite themselves with zeroes as soon as you dare to leave the confines of the country; nor is it that purchased songs on your PowerBook will simply refuse to play once you cross the border. All Shawn is saying is that, following some unrelated technical difficulty, he reinstalled everything on his PowerBook, including his backed-up iTMS music; when he tried to play said music, iTunes required him to reauthorize his PowerBook, as one would expect; and that he was unable to reauthorize because, after moving to Canada, he no longer had a credit card with a U.S. billing address, which is apparently a requirement for authorization.

Now, note that we're not saying that Shawn doesn't have a valid complaint; if you buy a slew of music while living here in the U.S. and then you move to another country, you won't be able to reauthorize your Mac to play that music if you need to (unless you still have a credit card with a U.S. billing address). That does strike us as a little unfair; worse yet, it implies that if you ever decide to stay in the U.S. but cancel all of your credit cards, you might be prevented from reauthorizing any Macs. (Then again, living in this country without at least one credit card is tantamount to high treason anyway, so maybe that's not so far off the mark.) But people have been talking about this issue as if just hopping on a flight to Japan for a business trip will cause your PowerBook to burst into flame as soon as the plane leaves U.S. airspace, just because you had an iTMS copy of ABBA's "Dancing Queen" on there, and it's just not true. Somebody might set fire to your PowerBook because they can't stand ABBA, but that's an entirely different matter, and hardly Apple's fault.

In fact, we don't believe one exists in this case, but if you're dead set on finding a conspiracy, here, you'd do much better to focus on Shawn Yeager himself, whose bio mentions that he "was responsible for the development of one of the earliest online music retail operations, musicdirect.com." MusicDirect is, obviously, at least peripherally a competitor of the iTMS. Furthermore, Shawn also worked for Microsoft-- as "part of an elite team of business development and technology professionals tasked with answering Netscape's threat to their dominance in desktop and server technology." His main task was apparently to "drive adoption of Microsoft's then-nascent browser and web server software." (So the whole IE/IIS thing is his fault.)

Determining Shawn's motives, real or imagined, for discrediting Apple's iTMS are left as an exercise for the conspiracy nut. Meanwhile, feel free to travel overseas with iTMS music-- just don't cancel those credit cards.