To be fair to them, they’ve done it pretty well – compared with some of the more extreme manifestations of digital rights management, you get a surprising amount of leeway even with DRM-protected tracks purchased from iTunes, annoying (if understandable) niggles notwithstanding.

Needless to say, though, Apple gets the blame for every restriction – and I have a huge amount of sympathy with them, as I regularly get hate mail at work from people who think that we’ve deliberately restricted access to online video clips out of sheer spite and perversity. The idea that there might be copyright and other legal reasons that a respected organisation might have to respect in order to get access to this material in the first place doesn’t seem to have crossed their tiny little minds before they put finger to keyboard to sound off – in fact, I bet half of them don’t even recognise that such issues exist at all!