As a music consumer, I'm thrilled with this--no more do I need to carefully manage my authorizations for music playback amongst the various machines I use. I can burn anything I want, back up my songs without having to re-rip them, and generally not think about what happens to my music if the iTunes Store ever vanishes. With one click of a button, I can upgrade my entire library and be done with DRM...in theory, at least. (Of course, there are , but it's still better than DRM-encoded music.)

So it seems, finally, the music industry gets it. Given the chance, consumers will pay a reasonable price for unprotected, high quality music that they can use as they wish. Unfortunately, the video industry hasn't yet apparently seen even a flicker of such enlightenment in the distance. You can see evidence of their confusion all over the iTunes Store, starting with iTunes Plus.

What about video?

iTunes Plus applies only to music in the iTunes Store, not to video (or audiobooks, for that matter). So while my music will be "free," I'll still be messing with authorizations for the video content I purchase from the iTunes Store. That's unfortunate, and strange, given that the large size of movie files means they're typically harder for consumers to distribute than relatively small music files.

Why is an HD movie different than an HD TV show?Beyond iTunes Plus, you can see more confusion in the handling of high definition (HD) content on the iTunes Store.