Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Families

Just toss "family plan" into Google and look at the results that come up. It's a really common term and they pretty much all have arbitrary limits like this, because "family plan" means "plan that might be more suitable for families" not "plan that suits every single family ever."

It's common with other words too. Happy hour isn't limited to happy people, nor is it guaranteed to produce happiness. Kids meals have an arbitrary age cutoff even though "kid" is often more varied. Express lanes are sometimes slower than the regular ones. Hacker News is rarely about cutting things with rough or heavy blows, and often not about news.

You ask, "whose problem is that?" My answer would be, nobody's, because there isn't a problem for anyone to have in the first place.

Contractual. Not a moral issue, not an ethical issue, just that Google doesn't want to deal with people that way.

One can fruitfully discuss the second-order issues of excessively-strong DRM but I'd consider that, well, a second-order issue. The first-order issue of Google not wanting to contract with an amorphous group of "family", a word that has basically no agreed-upon meaning (even if there is a legal one it won't match everybody's idea) isn't that horrifying.

You can't send a DVD or a book instantaneously around the world, but you can with a digital copy. This means there is a lower bound to how fast you can share a physical copy, so the practical effect of the ability to share a book has a limit. There is no such limit with digital goods.

Second, do you really want to go down the route required to ensure that 'only one device can consume the content at a time'? You can only ensure that by requiring a constant internet connection, to verify that you are the only one consuming the content at a time (or at least require you to go online to 'check it back in' to allow another device to use it)

There's some amount of allowed sharing that (they believe) is optimal for their revenue, and apparently that's greater than zero, so that's why they have introduced this "Family Library" concept. They could have chosen not to do it at all, that's a valid setting too.

I'm sure that they have considered "only one device can consume the content at a time" but decided that it's not the best option, especially for the sales of "long tail" older content - your own mention that "Groups which share newspapers, DVDs, books, etc between them, often counting hundreds of members" exist is a very good answer about why allowing groups without limits could be a bad decision.

Fully meeting arbitrary definitions of "family" isn't the goal of such policy; the goal is to balance ease of use (i.e. match the general expectations of target audience) with limiting exploits to something that doesn't have a big impact on revenue. The bottom line doesn't care if Bob is your roommate or bedmate or what family relationship you (don't) have; but it does care about how convenient it is for random Bobs or distant family members to join your group instead of paying for another copy.

It's worth to look at the alternatives you have - a roommate that's not a family member is anyway likely to watch your copy, so allowing them to join a group isn't a lost sale; but an overseas adult child is likely to buy stuff on their own, therefore excluding them is a feature, not a bug.

So I think the family number limit makes sense.

I dated a woman with Russian ancestry in NYC, she used her family's Amazon Prime account. Her parents weren't the primary account holder either-- the account had nearly 200 addresses in it when you go to the "where do you want to ship this?" option. The extended family and "friends of the family" were all on it. It worked great--- except everyone can see the order history. So there was some family drama when her younger sister ordered lingerie to her boyfriend's apartment, using that Prime account.

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/lack-capacity-to-cont...