Purchased iTunes tracks "not authorized to play"

Odd problem - anything I've bought from before the 17th of August has decided that it's been authorized on more than 5 machines and will no longer play on my Macbook. Only thing is, it hasn't - my media has stayed on this machine and hasn't moved - it may be authorized on one other machine, but certainly not 5! Same thing has happened with my iPhone apps - ie. anything from the iTunes store seems to be affected.
Any ideas why it would suddenly decide that I can't play my audio / video purchases any longer? And how do I deauthorize the other 4 "ghost" machines to get my media back!

Man, this is apparently happening to more than just me. Which makes me feel a 'little' better. But still ****** me off because I can't watch a single movie, TV show I've purchased going back years. Even 'free' downloads!
Songs play fine. It's only video content. Like some of you, I've also received almost 'overzealous' emails from Apple, attempting to help me resolve the issue. My guess is, they screwed up, they know it's quite obvious they screwed up, and they're trying to quash all this before it gets out. Plus they want to avoid issuing massive refunds to numerous customers. I would imagine this could become kinda pricey after refunding just a handful of iTunes user's purchased movies, TV shows, music videos, et al.
I was even desperate enough to try purchasing a new movie, thinking another purchase would 'hopefully' prove to the software (as if it's intelligent!) that I owned the content long since purchased, sitting on my hard-drive. Fat chance. That would have been too easy.
Crazy thing is, all shows, movies, 'iTunes-downloaded video' of any kind, transfer and play on my iPod same as always. Even after syncing since the problem started.
My computer keeps giving me the same error message: "This computer is not authorized to play this content. Please open iTunes to authorize computer." Or something similar. That's the gist anyway. Never mind the fact iTunes already IS opened or I wouldn't be OPENING the content to begin with.
The problem totally has Apple stumped and I want my old, "pre-Genius" iTunes back because that's when this problem started—with iTunes 8.
The perpetual fixing of what's not even broken, repackaging it, and then re-selling it to us all over again is beginning to drive me a bit crazy. No wonder some of the top audio engineers and producer friends of mine are still using G3s and G4s that they never connect to the web—keeping their machines 'frozen in time' and protected from any downtime from ludicrous updates.

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