Apple isnt responsible for your lack of a proper back-up solution. if all your CDs became scratched, would you expect Tower Records to replace them all?
Actually, yes. And the media industry brought this upon themselves. The naive view of "buying" a CD (or a movie on disc) is that you subsequently "own" the content, and would be free to back it up. The media industry cleverly circumvented this by saying you actually buy two things: The medium (disc), plus the "license" to view the content. But if that is the case, then I should be allowed to buy a BD version of the same content for a reduced price if I can show I already paid for the license when I bought the DVD. Even if one argues "but with the BD you're getting
more pixels of that same content", then it should at least be (almost) free to download an SD version of a movie to stream it to my iPad, and I should
certainly be allowed to backup, format-shift, or whatever. However, most content owners have been extremely queasy about this idea.
Incidentally, Disney
does replace damaged DVDs at reduced cost (presumably just the cost of the disc + shippng and handling). See
the Disney website.
Apple seems to have broken some ground here with their iTunes Match thing and with movies in the cloud, but I agree with the OP that they should take a firm stand
for their customers and
against the distributors, saying "This customer has paid their license to view the content - we are going to make sure this customer will have access to this content forever." They'll probably have to convince the distributor that they will not make this content available to new people who haven't paid the license in the past - even if they may have to concede and let distributors disallow selling of
new licenses.
The argument "it's in the small print" doesn't hold water in my humble opinion. It's something Apple might choose to hide behind, but I can't understand why we customers feel the need to defend this. Apple clearly advertizes the notion that the cloud
is the backup.
Personally, I don't believe in the cloud at all, for exactly these reasons.