The Mini is back, but we lost all the data - thus the network drive that I bought for automated backups :/

Anyway - recreating my entire music library was going to be a royal pain in the butt - and even though Apple's DRM is (relatively) unobtrusive, it prevents one from getting songs off the iPod and over to a computer. Not a problem - shareware to the rescue. There were a number of applications mentioned on this page, and I grabbed "iPod Liberator". As I write this, my music library is being pulled off the iPod and back to the Mac. I'll still have to contact Apple support - my daughter lost her stuff as well, and the iPod doesn't have her library. We did make backups of all the music to CD though, so there's no actual lossage.

The upshot - all the DRM has done is make things less convenient - not impossible. Eventually, this will be seen as a bad marketing move.

Oh, and the "long tail" reference? I had a number of people point solutions out to me via my blog. Thanks to all!