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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
This does not seem like an enormous leap to make.
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...
To offer a one time download code seems far more tenable.
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.
Honestly I don’t understand anyone having any sympathy for publishers or Apple. They were the ones who chose to use the current method.
- 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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
(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.
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
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.
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...
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%.
Except IMO this class of "ownership" should cost substantially less because you get much less value.
> 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...
I take it you prefer that power to be reserved for those with high status?
"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.
Sounds interesting. Let me know when that starts happening.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.