For people that do not own an iPhone you have to use iTunes to sync music, etc to your phone. The one thing that always ticked me off is you cannot make a ring tone from a CD that you own that you have loaded into iTunes to play on your phone. So I never purchased any ringtones.
However, I was in the mood to try something different and I searched iTunes for ring tones to purchase.
I found 3 or 4 tones that I liked and I downloaded them. After the sync I noticed they were not listed under ringtones but were listed as song titles. That wasn’t going to work because who wants to listen to a 15 to 30 second song? I searched for information and didn’t see anything.
So I right clicked on the titles and selected to convert to ringtone. I noticed the box popping up saying .99 cents. No other information was provided to me. I made the assumption that you must have to go through this step to convert to a ringtone and that Apple already knew you purchased the song and would not be charged twice.
WRONG!
Apple charges you to download the ringtone as a song, then they turn around and charge you again to make it a ringtone. I read on a site that Apple says they must do this because the record companies consider this a second purchase.
I thought we had the ability from old court rulings to make copies of medium we purchased for our own personal use. For instance you have a record and you wanted to make a cassette tape to play in your car or walkman, etc.
Doesn’t the same rule apply here? When you download the item you are being charged a fee. Why be charged another fee to make it work as a ringtone on your iPhone?
Needless to say I am not going to go through this again. I do believe I will be contacting my state’s Attorney General’s office about this matter. This seems so deceptive and I did not see anything on iTunes that said this is what they would do. There are no boxes saying you are going to be charged again, etc.
Steve Job’s has been such a SOB to people throughout his life I guess his cancer is karma paying him back.
