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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Seriously. It's well past time that Congress passes a law explicitly to that effect -- if you lose access to purchased content, whether because your account was terminated or the content was removed, you get 100% refunded. End of story. Any TOS to the contrary are invalid.

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Refunds aren't sufficient, you are owed whatever the replacement cost is.

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.

That's unreasonable, wouldn't be practical, and goes against precedent.

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.

The bigger the asset, the more it approaches the parents suggestion.

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.

> and goes against precedent.

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).

It’s standard to have terms in a contract that limits liability for any warranty to “monies actually received”. That’s in addition to any separate clauses that disclaim any and all explicit warranty. I’ve never signed a contract without such a clause and would bet it’s already a part of all of these terms of service.

Yes... because warranties are optional guarantees of fitness being sold on top of the product. We aren't talking about a warranty on the product here, we are talking about the product itself, I have never seen a contract that says "oh, and we can steal the product back from you in exchange for monies actually received", unsurprisingly, outside of digital assets.

And of course that term is common because the default terms for damages can go beyond that (e.g. if replacement value rises).

It’s standard to have terms in a contract that limits liability for any warranty to “monies actually received”.

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.

Comparing physical objects to digital one is absolutely ludicrous. It costs almost nothing to copy a digital work.

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.

> 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...

> and goes against precedent.

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 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.

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.

As other already pointed out, this should only apply to DRM media. DRM-free should imply that the customer is responsible for it once the transfer is done.

I'd love for this to happen, not just for the amusement of seeing all the giant corporations suddenly jumping to DRM free distribution to save tons of money, and Tim Cook explaining for 5 minutes how innovative Apple was with reinventing their content distribution model.

I think Apple killed off DRM on music in the late 2000s and indeed, Steve Jobs was quite pleased with himself when announcing it.

(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 funny thing is, Apple had an iron grip on the music market because of DRM. If you wanted to license music for digital download, the music industry demanded DRM, and Apple had the only DRM consumers had any faith in. You couldn't use an alternative DRM scheme with iPods; FairPlay was Apple's proprietary technology and it was the only DRM iPods would recognize.

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.

Unfortunately, this would probably force them to treat purchase revenue as a liability on the accounting books.

What's the problem with this ? I'm not familiar with accounting.

It means that all revenue could at some point trigger a refund, for example if they want to exit the media distribution business and shutdown the services. That would be an expensive thing to do.

I suspect any law would state it has an availability period before refunds are not eligible.

That's only if they design the distribution system such that it relies on the existence of the servers. If I start up Age of Empires 2 (assume in a computer or older VM such that compatibility isn't an issue), I can start a multiplayer game through LAN without any issue. If I start up a game of Overwatch, I cannot play against somebody in the same room without connecting through Blizzard's servers.

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.

Is that standard practice on physical products which have warranties? If not, then I do not see why it would be necessary here.

I believe you have to put aside some portion of the cost of the item as a liability. So say you sold a $100 item that cost $70 and the average cost of providing warranty service per item is calculated to be $10. Then you would have to set aside $10 of the $100 as a liability.

Warranties are for things that break on their own. If the manufacturer of a physical product broke into your house and smashed it with a sledgehammer, they'd absolutely be on the hook for what they did, warranty or no warranty.

Only if they decided to retain the technological means to revoke access to the items purchased.

I know literally nothing about accounting, but does it really work that way? I figured you would just be able to count the portion of purchases you expect to be refunded as a liability, rather than all purchases.

The 100% return creates a liability to return the revenue to the buyer.

Well, question: suppose Steam ran out of money tomorrow. Do you think it would be acceptable for Valve to just delete all user accounts and games, if it saved them $100? Or do you think they have an obligation to customers to at least provide a single transfer of each game download to archive.org or someone, and give customers a magnet link for each game they own?

Which employee is going to be responsible for doing all that, considering they just ran out of money and most definitely will not be getting a paycheck for executing this plan?

That's why this needs to be a law - to create an incentive where one would otherwise not exist.

I think the slightly longer version is that going bankrupt is not usually a discrete step in time and that planning and negotiating between creditors, debtors, and the government is going on. So if there is a law there is a government interest in customers being treated right before, for instance, big owners get a payout from a sale of assets.

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 very much doubt Valve has the required licensing to release the game they have on their store to any other platform (except for their own games). If Valve ever goes bankrupt and closes shop, it is likely that the users would lose access to their games.

That doesn't really pose any difficulties for the rule that you have to refund purchases when you terminate the user's access. Under this rule, Valve would incur a bunch of liabilities to its user base, which it would then mostly not pay because it's bankrupt.

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.

> 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?

I don't know. All I know is that debts are commonly tiered in this way, and maybe there's a way to do it here.

Perhaps, but it's more likely that they'd figure out how to retain a read-only account - one with basic settings for email/password that could be changed, but everything else was static. No purchases, no email, no uploads, etc.

This does not seem like an enormous leap to make.

Only if they use DRM. It’s not possible for me to lose access to the music I’ve purchased on iTunes, the games I’ve purchased on GoG, or the audiobooks I’ve purchased on libro.fm. (Except through my own fault, which shouldn’t apply.)

iTunes doesn't use DRM anymore? I haven't used it since I had a 1st gen ipod mini back in high school, but I remember only certain music was available without DRM and you used to have to pay extra for it.

When they dropped DRM, they raised the price a bit. I don’t remember them ever offering a choice, but I could be wrong—regardless, the slightly-more-expensive, DRM-Free songs are all that’s available today.

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.)

I would imagine this not being the case if they can show that the customer downloaded a DRM free copy of the content at any point. After that it is the customer's problem to keep access to the downloaded copy.

That's why I uploaded all of my DRM free purchases to iCloud, that way I'll have access to it forever. /s

Oh well, they should have thought about that before diving into a market thinking that they shouldn't bear any responsibility for their actions towards consumers.

I would suggest as an alternative to a refund a way to download you content with reasonable notice(30-60 days) in open formats.

Content gets removed from Netflix all the time, especially after they pivoted to their own production versus hosting content produced by others. How much should I get back?

A netflix subscription is access to content, not a purchase of content.

Indeed. And the model makes this very clear too. On Netflix there is a button 'watch', while on iTunes and many others, the button says 'buy', 'purcase' etc. One implies a transaction, the other implies using already accessible content.

Might be the reason for Apple Arcade...because the buying-but-not-owning-business model is EOL

I doubt it is EOL. There is demand for "owning", so there is a business-model there. It might be shrinking or changing, but at least for a niche, it will stay.

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.

I’m reminded of a parody report noting Netflix was trialing a “browse only” plan, so you and your partner can argue endlessly about what to watch, but never have to make a choice.

[1] https://www.theonion.com/netflix-introduces-new-browse-endle...

And crucially, from the consumer's perspective, this isn't unreasonable. Unless you watch only rarely, you probably aren't paying anything like the full market price of a permanent copy of each movie or TV show you watch on Netflix, just as in days gone by you paid much less when you rented a movie on tape from the video store instead of buying. You might rationally prefer to pay a smaller amount for library-style access to a large pool of content for a certain period rather than the full purchase price of every specific piece of content you watch, and in that case, the deal is in your interests as well as Netflix's. Now, if a supplier started charging around the same amount as a full purchase would have cost but still strongly restricted the associated use of the content, that would start to look abusive.

How much should that digital content cost then? Make a DVD once, never think about it again. To offer digital copy that loses no value over time and must be available forever seems like a bad deal from the publisher's side.

To offer a one time download code seems far more tenable.

There could be other ways to manage it, like specifying how long the rental would be valid for (I think iTunes started this way with movies), instead of alluding to the idea that you are buying it forever as part if a personal library.

Then make it non-DRM downloadable content that will be playable forever at the discretion of the consumer, like music bought on iTunes, then. Or at least mention the period for when the licensing will be honored during “purchase” and stick to it.

Honestly I don’t understand anyone having any sympathy for publishers or Apple. They were the ones who chose to use the current method.

Then they should advertise it as a one time download or a limited time rental. I don't have an issue with that.

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.

You don't have to keep offering it. You just have to not turn of DRM servers or offer the download without DRM in the first place.

Because the marginal cost of a digital file is too darn high?

If the download had no DRM, and I could freely copy it, I would have much more sympathy. Usually transfering to another machine is hard, or impossible.

Do files from itunes have drm on it these days? I thought waaay back in the beginning they did have it, but then at some point they went drm free. (At least fir music) At what point did they sworch back?

Movies have DRM. Music doesn’t.

Music does not have DRM (which is great!), but everything else you can purchase does—books, audiobooks, movies, apps, etc.

There are lots of possible solutions:

- 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.

Whether it explicitly advertises buying content for X years is hardly relevant in this case. The issue is that Apple claims the right to shut it down at any time. If they promised 5 years and shut down the account after a month, the same issue would come up.

I was addressing the parent's comment about making content available forever being uneconomical.

My original, root comment was already about the immediate issue with Apple.

Right, but then they would only need to refund content purchased in the last 5 years.

Lots of similar replies. I meant if a DVD costs $25 and a digial download comes with a long-tail(forever per the comment I relied to) then how much should it cost? More I would imagine.

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.

Having to run DRM servers in perpetuity lest you be financially ruined seems like an appropriate tradeoff and counterbalance to DRM.

If you really want such a high level of control, then it accordingly comes with a high level of responsibility.

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