Apple sued for terminating account with $25k worth of apps and videos
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
For most people the term will be "forever", so that is the expectation.
It's simple: if apple want to terminate your account, they need to refund you for any content you lose access to as a result of that termination.
I take it you prefer that power to be reserved for those with high status?
Sounds interesting. Let me know when that starts happening.
"Yes, it should be reserved for those with high status, and high status should be reserved for people who are chosen by and accountable to the people over whom they have power."
So you can have a 1st Amendment, or you can have your Designated Excommunicators, but you can't have both.
> Price says that Apple terminated his account when the company suspected him of breaching its terms and conditions, but due to the clause in question Apple did not have to confirm a breach occurred or give Price notice or explanation before shutting down his Apple ID. [0]
[0] https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/consumer-pro...
I would start with, Mandatory Arbitration.
Let consumers take these companies, including credit card companies, to court. What is the limit for small claims---$25,000? Companies might treat customers different? I wouldn't mind doing away with Terms if Service all together. If a company can't act within our laws without a 10 page TOS, so be it. Or, maybe strict protections for small companies, and nill for large companies. Companies that can afford to investigate claims against them?
All my belly aching here won't do a thing though. These companies have bought our representatives.
I'm waiting for a day someone has a successful website, like Hacker News, where people could offer suggestions to their representatives directly.
I don't think I'll ever see that day because those in charge know these matters are above the intellect of most Americans, and most Americans would rather escape the inequities of real life, especially on line?
I just looked up that 2008 Consumer Protection Act.
This popped up?
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/03/811718978/supreme-court-casts...
Point being, IRL stores don't retain any control over anything you buy.
I know neither of our analogies mirror exactly is going on, but that's part of the point. Maybe this is a different class of "ownership". There seems to be many classes already close to what Apple wants.
I'm not sure who will win. I hope it's not Apple, but I've already agreed to worse agreements getting through high school and college.
Except IMO this class of "ownership" should cost substantially less because you get much less value.
For assets in the physical world, the provider can have legitimate reasons for not refunding you the lost access that you originally paid for, on the scale of a month or a semester, due to the difficulty of them finding a replacement buyer/renter of that asset for the remaining duration. Something "seasonal" like school enrolment is a perfect example of that.
For digital assets, though, the period that you wouldn't expect to be refunded for should be measured in nanoseconds.
The other huge difference of course is that people don't buy perpetual access to a dorm room, whereas they believe they do for digital goods. "Forever minus ten nanoseconds" is very similar to "forever", so the refund should be close to 100%.
On the other hand Apple purposefully advertises movies as “rentals” or “purchases” sure more sophisticated individuals know better (usually those in the tech industry savvy to the willful and deceptive marketing of the tech companies) but the average consumer understands they have purchased the ownership rights of the movie.
Continuing with a reasonable standard if you are suspended/expelled you are generally entitled to due process (certainly in public schools), on the other hand if you violate Apple TOS you may not have the same due process, but it is reasonable to assume they will not delete your data And purchases without the opportunity to retrieve the same. Otherwise it’s a license to steal, they could claim the bank accounts you have connected to Apple Pay are forfeited to Apple, they can publish your emails/photos to harass and embarrass you, etc...
I like that idea a lot. I would add that, at the very, very least, they should give you a personal link to download a snapshot of all of your data from their cloud at the time of termination: email, calendar, contacts, photos/videos, docs, et. al.
(Movies, not so much.)
I think the reason we never saw a similar model for movies and TV shows is because Hollywood was terrified of what Apple had done to the music industry.
Spotify and competitors are successful despite piracy.
Movies piracy is still just as big with DRM.
The way around this would be to have a way to lodge a DRM free copy, which would be released to the public domain when the copyright expires, or on abandonment (so people wouldn't be denied access if the company didn't keep their servers running).
Copyright is not a natural right, the balance is totally out of whack. Copyright terms have become abusively long; the deal is not fair anymore.
This is how you get software companies running almost everything on their own servers, subscription-only, updates-mandatory, so no-one ever gets a copy of the work themselves and copyright is irrelevant. I think it is abundantly clear by now that this is not necessarily a beneficial direction for the industry to be moving, at least not from the point of view of purchaser/user rights and future-proofing.
Alternatively, how about a law that no government-owned systems may directly or indirectly use any services where the source isn't available? That would be a big enough seed that the viral/transitive nature of the first law would probably spread to everything.
I imagine that copies that were illegal with copyright (with DRM stripped) become legal once it gets to public domain.
Content producers should be forced to choose between legal protection for their copyrights and technical protection. They should never have been permitted to claim both.
Inasmuch as I am sympathetic to the argument, how would a government force DRMless software without attacking encryption itself or violating a company's 1st amendment rights to sell whatever digital products as it sees fit? DRM is protected speech so long as encryption or encryption schemes are protected speech (malware a la Sony's rootkit notwithstanding).
>>Copyright is not a natural right, the balance is totally out of whack. Copyright terms have become abusively long; the deal is not fair anymore.
Copyright isn't a natural right but neither is someone else's content or products. Without copyright, every smart person would keep their inventions as trade secrets with limited disclosures/demonstrations that, like Greek fire, will eventually be lost to the ages. While copyright terms can be abusive and long, that alone does not make the concept invalid.
I think more interesting is the broader principle of withholding legal protection unless the company proactively provides a solution. Trying to mandate behavior by companies seems difficult to achieve politically, and leaves the government with the responsibility of enforcement. The enforcement/compliance work then scales based on the amount of creative material released with DRM. It seems unlikely that a government agency will keep up.
On the other hand, it costs the government nothing to withhold legal protection. Making it the company's responsibility to provide a DRM-free copy (or eventual activation keys, etc., details will vary) to a trusted government entity in order to opt-in to legal protection of their copyright scales 1-to-1. It also aligns the incentives of both sides of the copyright problem. Companies have the full protection of law during the period in which the copyright exists and the public benefits from works entering the public domain automatically. As an added bonus, the government has a central place to invest resources in archival and preservation of the huge swaths of our culture that we're currently in danger of losing. I'm very grateful for the Internet Archive but it is a shame that they have to operate based on volunteer donations. It would be great to have a means to take a means for the companies who created the content to fund is archival (via nominal fees for artifact registration).
On the other hand, the inability of small copyright holders to effectively enforce their theoretical rights is also unfair and totally out of whack, but in the other direction.
I am sympathetic to the idea that DRM shouldn't be able to lock people out of accessing works they have a legitimate right to access, and I agree that such abuse needs to be dealt with through updating the legal frameworks for copyright and consumer rights.
However, I think to credibly change the law as you suggest (so, essentially, a publisher can choose DRM or copyright but not both) you'd also have to introduce meaningful criminal penalties for possibly willful and certainly commercial copyright infringement and treat it akin to fraud or theft. Otherwise, why wouldn't the little guy who has a genuine concern about copying reducing the value of the work they are publishing forego copyright entirely and rely only on the DRM, with no rights even theoretically for society as a whole to ever benefit from that work?
As a point of interest, in the EU and UK, they probably would be legally required to do something like that for things like mail and calendars, because the GDPR says, roughly speaking, that they have an obligation to keep the data reasonably safe and an obligation to let the data subject have it in some useful format. I doubt those obligations would extend to other creative works you'd purchased, though, since among other things that would drive a coach and horses through international copyright agreements and several reasonable business models built on the resulting legal framework.
In the Netflix case it’s be even more difficult to argue since Netflix doesn’t own the IP and the catalogue is ever shifting. I’m afraid the future is rental at least because the consumer is no longer technically prepared to own and manage their own digital catalogue.
It's very different if (a) you pay per individual item, (b) there's an explicit or implied agreement that you have access to that item indefinitely. Then if your account is terminated, you should be refunded the value of having access indefinitely, which is the original purchase price.
Now maybe you're saying Apple can go to a subscription service where it rents "access" to the library, but those are very different terms.
and finally, big tech will have caught on to the business model of late 90s early 2000s porn sites
To offer a one time download code seems far more tenable.
Honestly I don’t understand anyone having any sympathy for publishers or Apple. They were the ones who chose to use the current method.
But they shouldn't advertise "store your purchased movies in the cloud for free" when they only do that as long as it is convenient for them.
- Explicitly advertise that you're buying access to the content for x years, not buying it outright
- Allow for non-DRM content download either as standard, or as a guaranteed backup option
- If a company goes bankrupt, bankruptcy proceedings ensure that users' content licenses are transferred to another provider at no charge, funded with liquidation proceeds -- with priority over contractors, lenders, investors, etc.
There are lots of solutions.
My original, root comment was already about the immediate issue with Apple.
Sure they could advertise longer rental lengths, or clearly tie it to the business (which is probably buried in the ToS already). But if congress legislates digital purchases to be available forever with a 100% refund attached, how much should that cost? It seems wholly uneconomical from a provider side. We all work in IT, but in an enterprise situation, you know how quickly LTS is de-prioritized.
I would price a true forever digital licence in the $100's because you have to account for so many variables like storage(what country(s) can I store this movie in), bandwidth (what quality must I provide), and regions(where can I watch this).
I would love a world where I can stream whatever, whenever, forever after a purchase but someone has to manage that, and forever is an insane horizon. Even 100 years is crazy! WWI-ish to today!
And if they offered DRM free downloads, are you ok with it being one time? What if it was watermarked? Would you be willing to secure your copies? At some level a business will want to make money on their product and prevent piracy.
I dunno. I want cheap, widely available, drm free media too, but I understand why it hasn't come to be yet.
If you really want such a high level of control, then it accordingly comes with a high level of responsibility.
For example e-books. I try to buy as many from the authors (or their publishers) themselves. Surprising how often an author sells their book themselves. DRM-free, almost always cheaper. Owned-by-me. As opposed to e.g. my "kobo", which I cannot backup and download for that inevitable moment that Rakuten/Kobo decides to close my account, "pivot" or stop offering services.
[1] https://www.theonion.com/netflix-introduces-new-browse-endle...
I suspect any law would state it has an availability period before refunds are not eligible.
It is perfectly reasonable for a company to be liable for refunds if they want to deliberately take products or features away from users. In order for a company to avoid this liability, they must provide a way for those features to still be available to users, even if the company no longer supports the product.
This is pretty easy and straightforward to legislate. A media company that provides distribution of individual works (like Steam or Apple, as opposed to subscription services like Netflix), must provide a method for users to easily and automatically back up all purchased content. A company that runs servers necessary to the use of a program (e.g. matchmaking servers for video games) must provide the server executable, in a form that can run on currently-available commodity hardware, and must allow the client to select a privately-owned software. Companies that don't meet these requirements would still hold full liability for refunds if they remove product features later on.
If there are literally no assets there's very little that can be done though, you could threaten the owners with jail but what can they even do if there is no money? If there were a law it would almost necessitate something more like unemployment insurance where companies are forced to hold insurance to deal with this in a predictable way if they shut down or close a customers account.
Actually, unemployment insurance might be a pretty good analogy. If a company goes out of business and you get laid off as an employee you get unemployment mostly paid for out of money the company paid to an insurance policy. In this case instead of being triggered by unemployment it's triggered by loss of access. In the same way, if a company is closing a lot of accounts their insurance rates go up.
They'd be pretty massive liabilities and would significantly eat into the recovery for other creditors, which could have effects on Valve's ability to issue debt, or might just mean that whenever Valve issues debt there's a clause making that debt senior to any future we-terminated-your-account liabilities.
How does that work? Surely that’d have to be something agreed to by both the lender and the customers?
This does not seem like an enormous leap to make.
If you purchased music before the switch, that does still have DRM. (As an aside, you can get rid of it by setting up a VM with an old version of iTunes and Requiem.)
If the good is no longer available except for at 10x or 100x the price, you are owed that. If the good is no longer available at any price, but the person with the liability is capable of making it available, they should be required to do so (or negotiate a contract with you that buys out your rights, but you should be free to decline that or to set whatever price you want).
This is especially relevant in the digital realm where it's an especially effective tactic to undercharge to try and starve competitors, and then raise prices.
The analogy here is if you buy a vacuum cleaner from a store and it doesn't work because of a defect. You bring it back and get your money back.
The store isn't required to provide you with another working vacuum cleaner. If the vacuum cleaner is no longer manufactured, they're not required to find one in mint condition on eBay that's 10x or 100x the price.
If you got to consume the media you bought for months/years and you get a full refund, I'd say you have nothing to complain about.
If a rich person buys an expensive asset and it is defective, they're often owed for loss of use/revenue because they have the power to negotiate purchasing contracts that provide this. Us poors do not have this capability.
On the contrary, this is with the precedent, damages due to breach of contract, theft, destruction of property, etc are cost to replace not the original cost. And specific performance (i.e. requiring someone perform the action to fulfill the contract) is available if monetary damages aren't calculable (i.e. there is no replacement on the market).
And of course that term is common because the default terms for damages can go beyond that (e.g. if replacement value rises).
And it's standard for statutory consumer protection laws to override any contractual terms and sometimes even make it illegal for vendors to suggest or imply that restrictions on the consumer's legal rights exist, at least in jurisdictions where consumer protection laws have teeth. Otherwise, every vendor (the big guy) could just require every consumer (the little guy) to sign away all their theoretical consumer rights as part of the purchase contract, and the theoretical rights would be worthless in practice.
The store does not lock your access to your vacuum while it's in your home. This may happen in the future with cars for example. Imagine you driving and suddenly your car dies because the car company "banned" you and locked your car.
Something very similar has already been happening for years with cars.
Car dealerships and lease/loan companies install remote tracking and deactivation systems in vehicles they sell/lease, with the idea being that if you don't pay your loan/lease, well the car just won't run.
There's been a number of cases where this has been abused. For instance in Canada a dealership locked a car they no longer owned[1] because the owner refused to pay a removal fee for the device.
Tesla has been removing features from second-hand cars[2], which is definitely trending in that direction.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-man-fights-ba...
[2] https://www.carsales.com.au/editorial/details/tesla-disablin...
Your analogy works against this point. If you were to deprive me of my use of a vacuum cleaner, then a court would absolutely rule that you make me whole. Those damages could be 100x the original price if that valuation can be demonstrated.
The store is bound to the terms of the warranty contract, which usually comes with limitations or allows for discretion when deciding how they shall honor it. But that applies to defects, not deprivation.
This is why concepts like opportunity cost and consequential loss exist. While your arguments here seem reasonable, it is also reasonable to argue that harm has still been caused to the consumer, if they originally had a choice of vendors to buy from, a bad one they initially chose has refunded (only) their original purchase price, but the current market price is significantly higher.
If the basic principle of awarding compensation for damages is to make someone whole to the extent that this is possible, then the consumer in that scenario does still have something to complain about. This seems particularly relevant with digital products, where copies are entirely fungible and if the consumer has lost access they previously enjoyed then this was the result of the vendor's decisions around the technology, either actively revoking the access or deleting the material somehow, or taking some action like switching off a DRM server that indirectly causes the same end result.
(What's old is new again -- Epic is basically doing the same thing to Apple now. It all starts when an entrenched monopolist receives an open letter, apparently.)
The music industry only caved on DRM specifically because they realized they had written Apple a blank check. Had Apple not had a long and storied history of trademark litigation from The Beatles' record label (also named Apple), they could have started directly signing artists themselves.
The difference between then and now with the Epic lawsuit is that iOS has no sideloading option. Going DRM-free meant you could sell music on iPods without paying Apple. For software, the closest equivalent would be webapps on iOS, but that usually entails rewriting significant parts of your app and losing access to certain functionality. You don't get push notifications, you can't access native UI so all your UI code has to be redeveloped to something worse, and so on.
Beyond that, there are problems there. What’s stopping me from getting all the latest games on iOS, latest movies as they come out then after a few years spend some time purposely breaking TOS so I can get it all refunded.
A movie is more valuable directly after release, same is true for games. Additionally a movie/game is more valuable to those who have not yet seen/played them.
They could just set a flag on your account to "consume only" or something. Your account would be banned from "interaction" or further purchases, but you wouldn't lose your content.
Well, not quite that simple, since a lot of people would de facto also lose access to their hardware and all work which relies on this software-hardware-combination.
Hypothetically; what if Apple were to cease to exist? Or wanted to discontinue their streaming services? Assuming Apple were in such a position, their financial outlook would probably not be good. They would likely be financially unable to reimburse that many subscribers.
How would winding down such a service work?
In fact, I'd argue that this ought to be the norm -- that content providers be forced to purchase insurance or something precisely in case they go out of business, to ensure customers will have their content migrated to another service, and be refunded for the small proportion of content that isn't available anywhere else.
When a company goes bust, if you are owed money by that company, you put in claims to the estate, and the administrators handle those claims according to a well specified priority list. The customers being reimbursed is part of that process. However, I know that gift cards and store credit tend to be at the bottom of the list, so I wouldn't have high hopes for digital assets being reimbursed either.
As others have pointed out, refunds aren’t realistic either, and the path can be abused.
A better solution is that you should be able to download your purchases when your account is terminated (or even when it’s active).
An active account should not be required to use your downloaded purchases.
Remember this sentence to change your mind for the next time you see some movie to buy online.
I understand I can lose access, I'm not paying for the content in the idea that I own it forever even if Apple goes under or I get terminated, but I have perpetual access to it given the circumstances don't change, and I pay for the convenience of this.
If I had expected to own it forever, I'd probably have bought DVD's, not digital.
This is the opposite of what it should be. DVDs degrade over time, and can last for as little as 10 years. Digital should be mean transportable and convertible indefinitely.
I would never buy digital thinking I'll have access indefinitely. At least with DVD's I can rip them and burn them on new DVD's if I wanted them to be "forever"
Or, more realistically and prosaically, they can and should debit the net present liability of keeping the server running in perpetuity from their corporate accounts at the time of purchase. Accountancy knows how to value such things and finance delights in monetizing them.
Maybe a self-hosted auth server of some kind is possible?
Adobe recently stopped letting you install CS3 even if you have the CDs because they took the auth server down. Do you think there was a reasonable expectation that when someone paid thousands of dollars for those discs, that they 'owned' them and had the right to install them repeatedly on their own computers?
>https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite.html
>You can no longer reinstall Creative Suite 2, 3 or 4 even if you have the original installation disks. The aging activation servers for those apps had to be retired.
Looks like they just added CS4 to the list...which is still usable software (and in fact offers features that are currently unavailable!)
When contracting with consumers these companies should be forced to be liable and accountable for their algorithmic decisions and arbitrary policy enforcement.
That wouldn't be unreasonable at all. "They clicked the accept EULA button" is not a valid excuse.
Pretending that consumers are able to negotiate a fair contract with Apple is denying reality.
(To be clear, I think that's BS, but that's how this happens).
I used to have an account on which I spent at least $400. After an attempt to change the email address associated to the account I got locked out. It seems the same email address was used to create a different account in the past and the move just destroyed my access and any possible recourse.
So I switched to Android and stayed on Android for the last 7 years. No more iPhones for me, just remembering how my content got stolen makes me turn away.
I used to be a big fan of iPhones when they came out, even had a first gen iPhone a couple of months after launch. But after losing access to my content it all turned into the feeling that I am being abused.
Thoughts?
I'm not convinced 'making digital goods disappear' is good. I know WHY it's done and totally understand the justification, but I continue to dislike and distrust the practice.
Should we normalize the idea that everything we own is fungible, at the discretion of a third party, for its exchange value? Under what conditions do they get to swap out our property for replacements or money?
Hopefully there will be platform independent store where you can buy once and available on all devices.
With digital you can have backups and in theory they could last forever as you convert the format into whatever is popular.
How do they price this? Do they not do CRCs and hashes and let your bits rot over time and have you buy a new one? How do you approach this commercially? Make music or video very, very faddish so even if it lasts forever no one will want to listen to or watch something out of style ten yeas hence?
I’m not defending Apple. I’m asking how do you price things reasonably if they potentially last forever?
Many of the oldest recordings still work, and can be played indefinitely with an optical needle. The time value of money means the possible purchase by a small fraction of buyers 20+ years out isn’t worth much at the time of sale. It’s only moving forward in time that makes anyone care about these sales.
Obviously not in the interest of consumers but I can see why sellers would go this route.
It’s only copying that’s protected not existing physical copies. It’s the same with a book you get the physical book and that’s it. If the copyright expired then you can do all kinds of stuff with the book that you don’t otherwise get to do, barring a few exceptions that apply universally.
You don't usually get the rights to play the music for large audiences or for commercial use - those cost extra.
If you didn't get those rights then you couldn't even play the CD in the privacy of your own home, as that constitutes a performance of the work.
(Of course I kind of think there's something fundamentally strange with the idea of having to get "performance rights" for a recording that you supposedly own, but that doesn't change the law right now.)
So this line of thought is completely incorrect, digital distribution did not invent the ability to have backups of media you purchased
This is not a valid line of objection, just because if someone destroyed their CD and did not have a backup would have to rebuy, same is true if someone did not backup their DRM free content.
This HAS NOTHING TO DO with the ability to backup, or the fact that physical media may degrade over time. That is a non sequitur and a red herring all in one
In reality this is not even about digital media copyright, but more about the rights of digital platforms to unperson you and seize your legally purchase products for any arbitrary reason (or in many cases no reason at all)
My initial question was tangential and more thinking out loud how they deal with lower sales velocities.
I would find that data to be very interesting, and based on what I know about the industry I would also say that neither one of those claims can be supported by any data I am aware of
They can potentially last forever, but humans don't. Since Apple's stuff is associated to a personal account, I don't see an issue here, vinyls can also last for a life.
On the other hand, consumers have lost the right to lend, give or sell the stuff they buy. That's not priced either, and we see every possible move be done to make these operations user-hostile, if not forbidden.
Of course there's an actual answer to this as well, the economic concept of a discount rate; things far in the future are worth less than they are in the present, by an amount depending on interest minus inflation.
I think the bigger problem now is that people don't buy enough movies for anyone to want to chase this down, and if you want to own a movie, 99% of the time I can get the Blu-Ray+digital version for the same price of the digital one, and then the license syncs to like five different video services. And if they all ban me, then I still have the Blu-Ray.
On the other hand, all digital video formats have always had the technical capability for DRM, starting with DVD.
MiniDiscs had "copy protection"[0] and this format was supported by major record labels[1]. They were first released in 1992.
> all digital video formats have always had the technical capability for DRM, starting with DVD.
By starting with DVD, you're skipping the DRM-free formats of Betamax, VHS, and LaserDisc then? Unless by "had the technical capability for" you mean "could be later extended to add", in which case there was Macrovision[2] for VHS, but also Extended Copy Protection[3] for CDs, also known as "the Sony rootkit".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc#Copy_protection
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MiniDisc_releases
From what I can tell, pre-recorded MiniDiscs were never popular. People bought blank ones and recorded their own pirated mp3s on there.
But, yes, that makes me technically wrong with my first comment because it is a physical audio format that has the technical capability for DRM.
> By starting with DVD, you're skipping the DRM-free formats of Betamax, VHS, and LaserDisc then?
They're all analog and so you can't make an exact copy. At least not without obscenely expensive studio-grade equipment. Yes, that didn't stop people from making copies of VHS tapes, and yes, you could tell how many times it was copied by the picture quality.
Yes, there certainly were - basically all early digital audio media were encumbered with SCMS[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System
I stopped seeing any value in purchasing/renting rights to movies and shows from the streaming giants. Want to watch The Office, sorry removed, no longer on Netflix. Oh, you are in a country that has a funny name, content not available in your region. Oh, you are trying to access your Hulu subscription from a Linux device? Max video res capped at 480p. It is such anti-consumer moves that makes me not feel bad for pirating.
IMO, the most maximum returns on home media consumption is gained by acquiring and archiving your own collection of media. I don't have to ask anyone for a license to watch my favorite movie from 1999 when I have the copy on my plex.
>Remember this sentence to change your mind for the next time you see some movie to buy online.
I read this as "no reasonable consumer would trust us".
Personally I treat my Apple purchases as volatile and approach the budgeting for them similarly as I would budget for events such as movie tickets.
If you use iTunes, and "add to library," like I do, you'll see how often albums get removed or replaced or remixed. It's unnecessary and unnerving. The labels are constantly faffing about with albums. Every couple of months, I'll go to play an album, and find that it only has, say, 2 songs in it. Sometimes I can go back and re-add it to my library, sometimes, there's a new "remastered" copy, and sometimes those songs are just no longer available in iTunes. I pay for the subscription, and don't buy music. And I'm glad. I don't know why these changes wouldn't happen to me even if I had paid for it, but maybe that would be exempted? If someone can tell me that this doesn't happen if I buy the album, I would snatch up some of my favorites right away.
Is this iTunes or Apple Music ?
Because it happens all the time on Apple Music which is why I hate streaming services.
I guess I will soon start a site about the amount of crap and hypocrisy modern Apple are saying. I dont know exactly what happened but post Steve Jobs Apple are getting ridiculous with their defence.
I wouldn't know about ToU violations, universities routinely get banned from arXiv for weeks because CS departments hand out assignments to write a webcrawler - no clue what kind of grovelling is requited there, but it must be well ritualized now.
That worked in a defamation case, but the First Amendment defense probably won't work in a false advertising case.
[1] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7216968/9-24-20-M...
Between 5 Suscription Services it would take to get the few TV Shows& Movies I care about, Privacy concerns and unethical behaviour like this i just can't be bothered to look for "legal" sources anymore when any decent private tracker has everything i need in one place anyway.
The content mafia didn't get it with music, until perhaps spotify for a while and now thats beeing split apart again aswell, they don't get it for tv shows and movies either.
I like the term
As a reaction to decades of cable TV, the market wanted and celebrated Netflix, one place to pay and watch all the shows and movies you want.
But with time, what we got are just multiple cable TV packages served over the internet, each with their own subscription model and poorly developed app.
it just seems like such an absurd idea that everyone would have their own collection of media like this. all of that plastic being generated and then eventually thrown out just so you can have a dvd sit on a shelf where you will use it once every few years, once a decade or maybe once and then never again. i don't know if moral is a word i would use to describe all that
1. Apple and Amazon will add language to their Terms and Conditions stating that regardless of the phrasing on their websites and apps, access to the media that customers purchase will be revoked if their account is terminated. And since it's in the agreement, it's binding: in general, you can't sue to get out of a contract just because you discover you don't like the terms later on. (Whether or not you actually read it before agreeing to it.)
2. Apple and the class action attorneys will settle this out of court. Apple will pay the attorney fees and reimburse the lead class member for the value of the media he "purchased". Everyone else who joined the class action as a member will get a $5 credit to their Apple account.
A very common term in contracts is what is called a merger clause, and what it says essentially is that the contract forms the entire agreement of the parties, and that any oral representations not contained in the contract are irrelevant and to be completely disregarded. But there are courts that hold that a merger clause is not absolute and has its limits.
Make no mistake, contracts and their waivers are powerful. However, there are lots of court rulings where the courts have held that you can’t say X explicitly and have the contract say Y. In those situations, the courts will often enforce the X promise.
But then you get into a practical issue here. If you were an effected individual, you’re going to have to hire a lawyer to make that argument, and even with $25,000 on the line, that’s probably not a situation where the math works out.
There are also places, like here in the UK, where statutory consumer rights law explicitly says that trying to hide behind those clauses doesn't stand up. You can't have a salesperson answer a consumer's questions about a product, and then when the consumer finds the product doesn't match the information they were given after buying it, argue that your Ts & Cs say anything the salesperson said before the purchase has no weight. Moreover, if you make a habit of trying, you're likely to attract not just action by the consumer themselves but also the attention of regulators who may be considerably more powerful than any individual consumer.
But like I said: the cynic in me says neither is going to happen.
IMHO chances for DRM-free downloads from Apple are very very slim. But not zero.
In the context of "as a direct consequence of this lawsuit." Which, y'know, is pretty obvious from the parent comment it's a reply to?
Given downloads are possible even with DRM, that isn't even raised in the suit itself. The lawsuit hinges on the loss of availability of further streaming of the titles.
There is literally zero chance.
I do however believe that Apple will just settle this out of court, specifically to avoid such a ruling.
An example of consideration in a penalty clause like this is AT&T's failed acquisition of T-Mobile US, where the contract forced AT&T to pay $3 billion and give up wireless spectrum when they abandoned the deal. In this case, the consideration was T-Mobile's time and money spent entering the deal in the first place vs. the penalty to AT&T.
It's also worth noting that "unfair" and "deceptive" are not synonymous in their legal definitions. An unfair practice involves terms that are not beneficial to one party and are unreasonable to avoid, while a deceptive practice is one that misleads the party into accepting unreasonable terms.
In the US, without legislation we rely on the contracts we sign. When we sign contracts with trillion dollar companies we don’t get to negotiate.
(I think this issue is related to right to repair, which is continuing to gain steam and might be a good effort to join forces with.)
Not where I live. You can’t sign away rights given to you by law.
Ohhhhh this is great news! This has been a personal soap box of mine for years and years.
I really hope that the outcome will be that going forward at least, these words won't be used lightly anymore for risk of false advertising lawsuits. That should take care of a bunch of the "just rent it" business models that on second thought aren't really what the customer wanted at all. Well, I may be wrong about it. Maybe the world really doesn't care. In which case, at least language will be re-joined with reality in this case.
Edit: and at the risk of starting a fire here, this might also call into question some practices by the likes of Tesla and John Deere
In countries with consumer law, no. For example, where I live (Australia), it's absolutely unambiguously illegal to mislead the consumer. It's pretty obvious to everyone that putting "BUY!" in 72pt font and then a tiny "...a limited-time license" somewhere else on the page is misleading, as the word humans use for that is "rent", and therefore it would be false advertising.
How much of what you pay for "digital rentals" goes to creators and towards running the actual infrastructure to download/consume media? This is a questions a lot of companies don't want you to be thinking about.
More generally, it all comes down to the questions brilliantly formulated by Neal Postman:
https://strawdogs.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/neil-postmans-6-q...
This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it.
> How much of what you pay for "digital rentals" goes to creators and towards running the actual infrastructure to download/consume media?
If you look beyond the big players you'll find some people earn more (semi-)self-publishing on the internet than they'd have ever earned with a publishing deal. On-demand/low volume print and having digital as your default channel also made "real" publishing deals available to more people.
Being on store shelves was not actually that much better than Spotify for musicians accounting for volume, they just had less competition because now shelf space is unlimited.
To be honest this is a really great point I've seen brought up very rarely. I think the digital aspect makes it so extremely obvious that it forced the conversation.
That said, there are more costs than the physical medium itself. There's the physical shelf space copies consumes (vs. digital media which can be copied on demand), the costs associated with the creation and shipping of the item, in-store human handling, not to mention all the consumer-level effort and costs of purchasing the physical media (going to the store and carrying it around, having it occupy space at home, taking care of not damaging it…)
The cost of publishing hasn't changed much. It just shifted from "making it to the limited selection" to "being visible in the essentially limitless selection". In the end you still need to make deals with retailers and invest into advertising (especially when storefronts don't do deals - or at least say they don't, hi spotify).
Except you're not renting books or optical media. You're buying them, and you can resell them or loan them to other people no problem.
There’s depreciation and an ultimate limit to how many times something can be lent, which only exists artificially in the digital world (libraries get so many “lends” of a digital license before they have to buy another). On the other hand, for end users, digital licenses are completely missing lending and selling and in some cases even backup and format shifting.
Has the first sale doctrine ever been applied to these licenses in court?
Coincidentally, NFT’s got the “transfer” side of the equation, but forgot about the “privilege” part! The tokens are yours in perpetuity, and can be transferred to others, but it’s not at all clear what privilege they provide.
I can't comment on NFTs beyond "wow, what a wasteful scam".
Exactly! This is the part that I cannot get past whenever people talk about NFTs. They are a neat toy, self-contained, and having unambiguous ownership of the NFT. But there is absolutely nothing in the real world connected to it. It's like those pie-in-the-sky physics models that have hundreds of free parameters unconstrained by any experimental measurement. Sure those models might make some interesting predictions, but they have nothing tying them to the real world.
I could imagine a system where NFTs are used to establish ownership, but that requires there to be some trusted source that signs the initial NFT. This could be a land surveyor to make a NFT that represents property borders, or a patent office to make a NFT that represents a granted patent, or a MMO video game company to make a NFT that represents a particular asset within the game. But as it is, J.K. Rowling could make a NFT representing "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", and I could make one as well. There's no indication of which one is a valid link from mathematical space to real space.
NFTs need a legal system in order to tie them to anything outside of the NFT ecosystem. They need trusted authorities who are the only ones that can generate NFTs with specific legal authority. And once you have that trusted authority, there's no point in having any of the other trustless blockchain architecture whose sole, flimsy excuse for existing is in avoiding having a trusted authority in the first place.
(Sorry, that turned into a longer rant than I had expected, but your phrasing crystallized some ideas that had been floating around my head, and I wanted to write them out to see where they went.)
The dollar has value due to a mixture of trust in its continued value and in the entity enforcing it.
Bitcoin has value mostly because people speculate it has value. The extra decentralization loses its value as soon as you add enforcement, because now it is just a really complicated dollar.
Similarly, smart contracts do not solve an actual problem we can't solve with real contracts much cheaper, and the contract itself is unenforceable if any participant stops cooperating.
If you have to rely on police and courts to enforce your smart contract, why do you need the decentralized smart contract to begin with? Can you even model a smart contract that satisfies the legal constraints of all countries where participating in it is possible? Why aren't you just leaving this to lawyers and signatures on paper?
Your point about the dollar is flawed. The value of the dollar may be a floating currency at its most ideal but its "true" value, outside of forex, is determined by fiat. The Fed just financially engineers it in a very complicated manner with veritable pulleys and levers and, somewhere along the way, a gun to everyone's private bank account in the form of artificial inflation/negative interest rates, punitive taxes, and from time to time, suing institutions that make US financial theater look bad by threat of dubious litigation.
>>If you have to rely on police and courts to enforce your smart contract, why do you need the decentralized smart contract to begin with?
If police departments have to rely on private citizens to be bounty hunters or informants, is there a point to having a police force at all? What's the point of a legal system that depends on executive enforcement when the citizenry is capable of doing so on its own? Why do we have to have a mayor/governor/president? Why not a government of individual people addressing their own affairs as need be and judges/arbitrators as referees? The answer to both sets of questions is that they are both options to a larger question: "How should one handle interpersonal expectations and violations thereof?"
In addition, I don't see how you read my statement and came away with the idea that I support vigilante justice or anarcho-capitalism. My questions were pointed towards addressing the unstated assumptions inherent to your question and the other questions in your post that I didn't quote. Namely, that a centralized authority or agreement of centralized authorities is a requirement to render any transaction/contract/agreement valid. That's an assumption I find to be unproven and easily contested.
But you don't. Not really. DVDs and books only last, what, 30-40 years. Are you entitled to a free replacement after that time is up?
I have little pulp paperbacks that are older than 40 years, and those are about the least durable books around. I expect finer books to last 100 years and as many readings... and to go on to do it again. Barring environmental damage or my deliberately binning them, I expect most books I’ve already had 20 years to outlive me by going another 50+... and I got most of them used to begin with, often already 10-80 years old when I got them (a few older, but they’re outliers). If the next owner re-binds them many could survive another lifetime or two.
Now contrast that to digital downloads with DRM, where you are at the whim of the vendor. The worse example I've seen is a perpetual license expiring after 2 years, though I have lost access to several hundred dollars worth over purchases over the past decade (and I'm not a big spender).
It's true the physical book manufacturing is only ~10% of the price.
But you're forgetting costs of shipping, warehousing, stocking, retail, etc. Separate from manufacturing, roughly 40% of what you pay for a book goes to the physical retailer, and that's actually the largest chunk.
When you add up all the costs of producing and transporting and selling the physical book to a customer (and the publisher taking back unsold copies), they make up the majority of a book's cost.
The actual "license of content" cost of a physical book is a minority of the price you pay.
>This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it.
When I pay for a book in a bookstore, part of the money goes towards maintaining the system that produces and distributes books. The system includes various parties, like printers, publishers, distributors, books stores and so on. It's far more than 10% and there is nothing wrong with paying for a reasonably working distributed system like that.
Replacing all of those companies with a single megacorp like Amazon or Apple is not going to result in the same system running cheaper. It will create an entirely different system. Over time that new system will shift to publish entirely different type of content, it will have an entirely different relationship with consumers and authors and it will have completely different effect on the society at large. Given what I see already, I seriously doubt those changes will skew towards the positive.
Simple as that sounds I didn't think of it before. It seems that if all the old systems can/might/will be replaced by the mega corp we could simply set a modest fixed megacorp-tax of say 1-2% and have the rest go to the creator of the text or video.
It was the author who provided the excuse in the old system why we should pay for easily replicated data. The argument that we should pay to be able to find the data was never a thing. It might as well be but it isn't. We can generously give this party 1% for the great effort they made finding the product I wanted to purchase. (The author should probably pay the megacorp for hosting and bandwidth)
After all, the mega corp is our hostage first and we are theirs second.
Yeah this will surely be more like 30%
And they also kinda accept the mediocre recommendation (often laden with ads and "place in front" for pay content) which just feels like habit after a while.
That said, I'm no longer using Spotify, and disappearing songs had a lot to do with it. I've been paying for a premium account for some 6-7 years, way longer than I should - it took me over a year to notice that I'm not actually using it, because half of my favorite songs are gone, and whenever I search for something particular, half of the time it's not there (or worse, there's some shitty cover of it). And it's not just the catalog that suffered since - also the UI of their mobile app rotten over time, and became incomprehensive.
But back in ~2012 - 2015 I sure as hell was happy with their service, and evangelized it to all my friends, and I did feel it's worth more than what I'm paying for it.
I guess losing music on Spotify isn't that big of a deal for most people, because - extrapolating music-related behavior from a couple dozen non-tech people I've observed over the years - the most popular music player isn't Spotify, it's YouTube. And YouTube does have it all, at least for now.
I'd believe they were actually happy if there was a streaming service that actually didn't have content randomly disappear like it does on Spotify, and if customers still liked Spotify more.
To me, at least, it seems like consumers don't have many choices. They have to compromise with Spotify and others dropping content at the whims of rights holders.
FWIW, Apple answered this partly recently. At least as it applies to music. It's not very much, but it's supposed to be a lot more than most other services.
I believe the context was refuting accusations in the Spotify dustup. I saw it on a site like macrumors, so some salt may be required.
Bandcamp gives artists 85% to 90% of the revenue they collect.
What is ridiculous is that they pretend the other option - "buying" - which is usually much more costly - is anything close to what people mean by "buying" in a non-digital non-DRM world. If I buy a book, the book is mine. I can read it forever, I can sell it, I can use it as a doorstopper if I like, but whatever I do it's mine. If I "buy" a movie on DRM platform, I can watch is only as long as the platform allows me to, and yet most people do not realize the profound difference. I think it's a good thing there's now a growing awareness that his is false pretense and it's time to shine a light on it.
Yeah. That will be a little less misleading. Also with an expiration date "Rent for 5 years". So people know what they are exactly paying for.
I like to call this "ownership light" and it would remove unilateral unaccountable suspension decisions from the equation.
The service provider is not burdened beyond reason and there is still a distinction made between this and "physical ownership" (e.g. no right to inherit / sell the content).
Are you saying this like it's a good thing?
I recently changed my mind on this and used to believe that digital goods should be treated identical to physical ones.
Fundamentally the nature of things make them different and we should recognize this when discussing what rights which party should get.
Whether the two facts I stated make sense is certainly up for debate, but I don't believe we can move forward insisting that rules imposed by the physicalness ( is this a word) are the same as rules imposed by human society.
The goal must be to find a set of rules that is fair to all participants and I'm certain this it is possible to do this.
Perhaps they should make a less confusing service if they do not want their customers to be confused.
It's very obvious (to those who know how FAANG walled gardens work) that it's a rental and contingent upon them not evaporating your account for some stupid reason. It's entirely non-obvious to the layperson.
Courts clarifying the first sale doctrine here would help a lot.
IMO, one should be able to resell or transfer software or media licenses they've already paid for. Moving online from physical media shouldn't suddenly shaft the consumer and make their media purchases evaporate when they die or lose their email address.
There is a high temptation to abuse the system due to the ease of making a copy. On one hand, it can be attacked with a zero-trust outlook from technical angle (DRM). On the other hand, in a society with higher minimum quality of life and satisfaction eliminating required trust may do more harm than good, as really no one would want to go through the trouble of making illegal copies.
I strongly agree that “selling” something you do not get to own should not even be a valid concept.
Reselling rights don't have to be granted, and if they are, they could even include "fees" for reselling to limit a rental market from taking place.
Also, these corporations claim their TOS allow them to deny access if they choose to, and might even have done it for legitimate reasons. But nothing is preventing them to implement restrictions on accounts rather than total deactivation.
Obviously if only a couple of people would do it, there would be no effect except them getting their accounts suspended. However, it would be very interesting how this would pan out if a very large number of people would do it. How would apple react and how would the credit card companies react. Maybe someone should start a campaign to do just this.
Oh gosh, there’s a huge problem on iOS & iPadOS with this. Files app and Books app (and even Photos) will prune files from the local file system to save space. This is alright in itself, but the user has very little to no control over which files are selected algorithmically for this process (there is no “never prune THIS file/folder” option). What’s much worse, there are no SLAs on how quickly the download will occur. I don’t know if it’s regional, but in Singapore I’ve found books app & files app never finish downloading content especially if you request for multiple files - even on WiFi & power. I work around this by storing zip files which I download and extract each time - because at least a single file might succeed downloading (higher chance of success).
This is a huge problem for someone who relies on iCloud when I need a file urgently on the go and all I have is 4G.
Even if this is an extreme case, I hope that Apple (and other platforms) are forced to change their language and/or provide more guarantees of access.
Most of the time the giants do not tell you what you done wrong. My son managed to get my Sony account banned for 2 months(from all online stuff including the PS Plus that I am I paid a year subscription), there is no way to appeal and the only thing Sony told me in the notification email is that it is about violence or sexual stuff , so fuck knows what t could be about , I know he shared some screenshots with weapons from a game - would be ironic to get flagged by game screenshots or it could be just malicious people reporting you (may idiotic kids are online playing Fortnite and are threatening each other with reports).
In my case i decided I will no longer buy any new product from Sony and I will probably jailbreak the console when I think the online features are no longer worth it.
Same here, my daughter got a big Apple account banned by messing with the associated email address, lost access to my "purchases" indefinitely. So I abandoned Apple's platform, I think it was around the time of iPhone 5.
I bought only Android after that, bye bye Apple and your stealing ways, ten years later I haven't forgotten what you did or forgiven you. I bet during this interval you lost more than what you stole from me! During this time I bought at least 4 flagship phones and God knows how many apps from the competition.
You know, that lovely physical device you supposedly buy and own, but can be denied its use indefinitely if Facebook's algorithms decide to terminate your account for some reason (which tends to be more likely if you opened an account just so you could play).
Color me unreasonable
I’m not how Apple and Amazon’s respective media rental businesses would rename themselves to remove the word “store” e.g. App Store to App Rental. I do agree that both companies, Google, and others mislead potential customers by labeling what is essentially conditional, long-term rentals / leases as ownership.
In the case of apple you don't know, because apple might decide to terminate your account before you even had time to watch the movie.
However there is a difference forcing a company to do additional business in the future or forcing them to not unilaterally keep the money for "purchases" made in the past.
Fully refunding customers (+interest) and/or explaining the decision to suspend the account in detail (perhaps even allowing consumers to correct potential problems) is not burdening Apple beyond reason.
No one here seems to argue that they must allow the plaintiff to continue shopping in iTunes.
What happens if you have someone who is genuinely abusing your systems?
Are you just powerless until it reaches the point of criminal actions? That doesn't seem unreasonable, as I can't actually think of many examples of abuse that wouldn't be criminal..
There's an easy out for Apple and others: you give the customer the ability to access what they paid for independently of the seller. There's no requirement for Apple to be involved any more once Apple has delivered the file in way that can be opened independent of Apple.
There's plenty of ways to deal with this problem, but most of those cut into sales figures, such as dropping the pretense that the stuff you rent is related to owning things at all (i.e. not using the word "buy" anymore).
So a user could sign up, watch all the movies they wanted for 10 years, and then get all their money back, provided they find a way to behave badly enough? Sounds like a pretty sweet incentive to some people, especially if you could manage to then repeat the cycle with another identity.
After all, a digital copy of a movie is a perfect copy whose quality shouldn't drop over time.
And if you buy something, it only figures that you'd be able to sell it when you're done with it. Digital media companies take that right away from you in many cases under the guise of digital subscriptions, but with Apple stating that you buy something, that doesn't seem like a big problem to me.
In fact the plaques were taken down after 20 years, but eventually reinstalled somewhere else:
https://www.laughingplace.com/w/news/2021/02/09/leave-a-lega....
The TOS for these media “purchases” would be more honest if they had a time limit, e.g.: 10 years. You are “purchasing” a 10 year license.
Allowing a download doesn't _cause_ more piracy - it just makes the user have more power and control over their content they purchased.
I have lots of DRM-free games on GOG for instance. So do people I know. We've never had a single thought about pirating these. We're grown ups, we don't have time for that kind of thing.
I think it's the opposite. There's no chance at all that they'd do that because Apple would only be hurting themselves (and likely directly destroying Apple TV in some way) and the existing industry assumptions about DRM and privacy are entrenched, if not core.
We are a long ways away from when you played ball with iTunes or you didn't play digital music ball at all.
They would also likely have legal and PR pressure to exert against such a move. Regardless of whether Apple is or isn't a monopoly, they definitely don't want a billion dollar industry going after them in that angle right now.
A while back they updated their service provider agreement to require users of steam agree to arbitration rather than court action.
The problem is that a user could not access their purchased games even in an offline manner until they agreed to the new terms. I was presented with the new terms, and clicked "I disagree" and Steam immediately exited.
I even wrote Gabe about this because I found it fundamentally anti-American.
I'm no lawyer, but I could see that forcing someone to agree to terms by withholding "property" they have legally purchased would not be enforceable.
I hope more people start resisting this narrative that all or our property and in essences our lives should be leased / rented...
What is not okay is buying a perpetual license and lose access to it because our big tech overlord decided someone shouldn't and go away with the money. At least locking the account and forbidding access to buying more content would be a fair middle ground IMO.
Post Ownership society is an expansion of the Planned Obsolescence model, where planned obsolescence still observed the right of ownership which most often becomes the issue as people inherently believe it is unfair / unethical for a company to planned for their product to fail at a certain time.
Post Ownership society wants to do away with the very concept of ownership, this way planned obsolescence, things like requiring a person to rebuy all of the their songs if they forget their password, or if the company chooses it it time for you to buy them again (i.e a tos violation made up by the company) there is not ethical issue as you never owned it anyway
It's a leading reason why I don't purchase subscriptions to streaming services or "buy" from digital stores. If it's not tangible I'm not buying it.
I'd also like to see a legal requirement for cloud services to allow access to stored content if an account is terminated. None of this "Our bot thinks you're bad so your accounts forever suspended without a human appeal system. Say goodbye to all your photos"
Agree. However. I should be able to play the files I have downloaded no matter my account status.
I’m not sure if that’s the case with apple downloads (though it’s my primary method of buying music, and I do suspect it is the case. )
Actually, Apple isn't the first to introduce a rather novel interpretation of the word "buy". John Deere did that first saying that buying really means an "implied license" or something. I've got no idea how they can get away with redefining words in the English language.
It's an interesting question, but I bet the computing, cultural, and even legal landscapes will have changed a lot by the time your premise comes about. There are other scenarios that could happen in the shorter term, like Apple revamping what an "Apple account" is, or getting out of the digital entertainment assets business altogether, or shifting its iTunes platform from the internet to the neuralcloud (which is, of course, not compatible with legacy "merely digital" formats)
I find myself reasonable and if I purchased something, I expect it to have access to it as long as the platform exists. And if they are planning to go out of content hosting business or close one’s account, then I would expect that they provide a reasonable notice and a way to download all the purchases content.
In an ideal world, everybody would do so, and the problem would go away very quickly.
Typically I’m anti blockchain, but perhaps there’s a use in here for it.
If those “buy” and “purchase” buttons had to be replaced with “license”, then companies might start moving back towards actual purchases.
1. Provide an unencumbered, fungible export of the content purchased, either at the time of the customer's choosing or once upon account termination (for any reason whatsoever).
2. Provide a full refund of purchased content at the time of content-provider initiated account termination (for any reason whatsoever).
3. Replace the language on these types of purchases with the word "Rent", with an associated rental timeframe of exactly these words: "Indefinitely, until {ContentProvider} permanently revokes your access with no warning, reason, or recourse."
"That's a lot of words to fit on a one-click checkout button" -> Yeah, that's the problem. These companies have spent years lying to their customers about digital content availability, driving growth and dominance by hiding the truth and making it easy. All of that text needs to be upfront, right where the customer sees it; not hidden behind a popup dialog with a cute little question mark next to it.
"That text is kinda scary, and doesn't properly represent the average consumer's experience" -> Well, that's weird, because that's almost exactly how most of these providers word the terms of these purchases in their terms of service. You know, those documents no one reads.
The fact that content providers can, at a moment's notice, revoke anyone's access to potentially thousands of dollars of purchased content, for any reason, with no recourse, is absolutely insane. Its one of the biggest mockeries of our digital age. It should never have been allowed; its a pattern that only gained market traction because no average, reasonable, typical customer realizes or considers that these service providers can take away their content.
To be clear: There is a ton of digital content which needs to be classified under this banner; its not just movies.
* Movies & TV (iTunes, Amazon, Google Play).
* Books (iTunes, Amazon, Google Play). Some of these providers are nearly compliant, offering decently accessible exports in oftentimes DRM-encumbered formats. DRM has to go to be compliant with (1); if that's not an option, well, there are other ways.
* Music (iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Bandcamp). Almost everyone here is already compliant thanks to MP3/AAC/FLAC/etc exports. Awesome!
* App Store Apps & In-App Purchases (Apple, Google). Attaining compliance with (1) here is almost impossible (though a point-in-time, downloadable and independently installable application package may work! the gall to consider offering that!)
* Digital Video Games (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Valve, Epic, Google Stadia, Amazon Luna). At least some of these providers are so close; just strip the DRM and you can be compliant with (1). I mean jeeze, offering a refund would suck wouldn't it; wouldn't it just be better to be friendly to your past customers?
* Video Game Digital Content (Epic/Fortnite, EA/Apex Legends, Activision/Call of Duty, etc). Many of these games sell in-game cosmetic and/or gameplay-altering items; some of them sell in-game lottery cards that will give you these items. These games are actually the worst offenders of the whole list, because they all run anti-cheat systems that are horribly inaccurate in-terms of false-negatives and false-positives. People just get banned, for literally no reason except "they got reported a lot and were running some RGB software for their keyboard" every single day. Everyone banned by these systems is marked a dirty cheater; they'll ignore your support requests, and sometimes even hardware-id your computer and share those hardware-id lists with other game companies. Compliance with (1) is impossible. They need to offer refunds or be honest about what you're buying; this may tangentially add a direct profit incentive to building good, accurate anti-cheat, which is something nearly none of them care about.
My wife bought a subscription box with her Apple Card and somehow the subscription service assigned someone else's email address to her account and won't let her change it. For reasons I can't quite understand, that service sent her one box out of a six-box subscription so my wife called to dispute the charges with Apple Card. For a few months now she's bin in this Groundhog Day like cycle of them taking the money off the bill but then, after contacting the subscription service I assume, will put the money back on her bill until she calls to dispute it again.
Now, I know this is Goldman Sachs she's dealing with and not Apple but, it is called the "Apple Card" and I feel like Apple needs to step in and make Goldman Sachs do the right thing.
Why purchase and download and be on a hope and prayer that I retain my stuff? If I download from a pirate source, I'll always retain my goods.
And https://xkcd.com/488/ is eminently relevant.
There are two distinct lawsuits. The previous submission is just about the case on Apple making content impossible to download. But this article also discusses the case where Apple terminated an account with $25k of purchases.