Who inherits your iTunes library when you die?

As a practical matter, a laptop and any software purchased for it gets put as a single line item on an estate appraisal for personal effects. Our appraiser certainly didn't want to boot up the laptop and examine its contents for valuable files. The only times I've turned on that laptop in the past year have been to look for clues about financial documents, look for pictures to use at her funeral, and to make sure I had a backup of her phd thesis.

Personally, I'm thankful that digital assets are non-transferrable because in my case, no one would have wanted them, and it allows me to feel no guilt about not putting them on an estate tax return.

Also, digital media are not the only non-transferrable assets that can potentially belong to an estate. Season tickets to sporting events and vehicle registrations come to mind, but I'm sure there are others.

I guess the question comes down to: if Apple allowed you to buy transferable licenses to music in the iTunes store at $1.50/song and non-transferable licenses at $1.00/song, which would you buy? I suspect the overwhelming majority of Americans would choose the $1.00 non-transferable license. Also, I suspect estate planning would almost never enter into that decision making process.

Thankfully, at least with iTunes music, this is not an issue of DRM. If there had been any music on my mom's laptop that I wanted, it would have been easy to transfer it.

Right now, if you can't even freely share stuff between the living in your own household, you don't really "own" it, and you can forget about a way to pass it on to your heirs.

You don't own stuff you merely rent, and you can forget about passing it on.

Are people only realizing now that the game has changed? This was obvious from day one: stores selling digital goods have it in their best interest to keep you buying the same thing over and over again, whether you buy the Playstation game you already own on PSN, or you have your buddy "buy" an album on iTunes because you can't let him borrow the CD.

Theoretically, this loss of convenience/utility should lower the price for the consumer. It is really up to the market to decide if they want to save a few bucks, or retain the right of first sale (or gift, in this case).

So if you're like my and consider CDs to be unreasonable, what other options do we have? If I have kids someday, I would certainly want to be able to pass down my music collection.

And, for the last point: What happens to our licenses if/when Amazon or Apple cease to exist?

(Side note: I'm comparing 10k CDs to 10k Books, because 10k Songs is vastly smaller than 10k Books.)

As successful as iTunes and Apple currently are, media distribution is still undergoing massive disruption. It's likely that something completely new and utterly amazing compared to any current online media store will win out in the end. Distribution services that provide a sub-par experience on the majority of hardware out there are doomed to fail even sooner. i.e. iTunes does not provide a good user experience under anything but OSX, and even there it's love/hate. Amazon and Google Play are serious contenders despite the artificial iOS obstacles Apple is heaping in their paths.

One might argue that iTunes will live on even if other stores win out, but legacy support only goes so far. Once iTunes stops making Apple money they'll wait a respectful period of time and then quietly shut everything down.

I know many will disagree with me on iTunes' fate, but all I have to do is to live long enough and I'm virtually guaranteed to have the last laugh!

Take ebooks as a much simpler example. The distribution costs of a single ebook are essentially zero. Even if you, as a publisher, pay Apple/Amazon 30% you're better off than retail and retail typically has a higher markup, means printing books, storing them in warehouses, shipping them across the country/world, etc.

On top of this ebooks are basically nontransferable whereas paper books can of course been sold secondhand. The latter is such a "problem" that the textbook industry, as just one example, will keep changing editions each year or two just to kill the secondhand market.

It should come as no surprise that ebooks are nontransferable either.

Given all these restrictions and lower costs of production it seems logical that ebooks should be cheaper than their dead tree equivalents. But oh no, they're typically the same price or even more expensive. This is nothing but greed. What's more, publishers are shooting themselves in the foot (long term) here because they should be encouraging a system whereby you can buy a given textbook, it can't be sold secondhand and the original owner keeps getting updates (people don't typically rebuy later editions of the same textbook I would guess).

Music isn't really that different. CDs, which are transferable, have the same costs of printing, storage, distribution and retail markup, even against the 30% (is this confirmed for music?) margin Apple/Amazon take yet I don't think you'll be saving any money by buying whole MP3 albums vs CDs (more often than not).

If electronic media were cheaper like it should be I think consumers would have an easier time accepting the nontransferability aspect. People, on the whole, have an innate sense of fairness (IMHO).

As far as iTunes accounts and the like go, on a practical level you can simply take over the account. Apple has a facility to change the Apple ID. I can't see any barriers to this.

EDIT: From [1]:

Traditional publishing has a traditional formula for calculating the retail list price, the price printed on the book. That list price is typically about eight times the cost of manufacturing. In clothing retail terms, that translates into a markup of about 88% between publisher and reader.

There are several reasons for the big percentage. Not only does the actual bookseller require a markup, but often there are two “middlemen” between the publisher and the bookstore: a distributor and a wholesaler who must each get a piece of the action. And of course the publisher wants to make a profit and better not sell merely for the cost of manufacturing.

which basically confirms the 12% figure. But I was referring to the retail markup and costs of distribution (distributor/wholesaler).

[1]: http://bookmakingblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/prices-discounts-...

It does raise the broader issue of households, though. When I have a family, shouldn't I be able to give them access to ebooks I've read and songs I've enjoyed? That's trivially easy with the physical versions (if sometimes annoying that someone else is reading a book you want to read) but how will companies handle the digital equivalent of sharing within a family?

> “I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family > would be OK with losing a collection of 10,000 books and > songs,” says Evan Carroll, co-author of “Your Digital > Afterlife.”

And I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family will be fighting Apple to transfer Britney Spears' last CD from grandpa's account to his favorite granddaughter's account. Or that cool Angry Birds iPhone app he paid 99 cents for back 20 years ago.

In fact, if the DRM'ed stuff you've bought is a one-time purchase (as opposed to a subscription of some kind), then it's in the provider's economic best interest to drop support as soon as possible. There's not going to be any more money coming in from the user once he's made his purchase, but there's going to be money going out to pay the DRM servers' costs because they consume physical space, power, bandwidth and technical expertise on an ongoing basis (as well as hardware that wears out and needs to be replaced).

I personally support as little DRM-crippled content as possible. I only purchase e-books in open formats, use GamersGate instead of Steam (avoiding DRM-crippled products), and buy a fair number of physical books and DVD's. I've actually walked away from imminent purchases, both online and in stores, when I discovered that the product I was about to purchase had aggressive DRM.

Anything else I still buy physical: books I care about, music, etc. As an example, if I was after a design-patterns book, I'd buy a physical copy. Algorithms book? Physical. PHP programming book: digital. The latest "how to launch your startup book"?: digital. I own CD's for all of my music.

As an electrical engineer I have had the experience of collecting hundreds of physical data books only to throw them all away years later. That world has changed completely with the availability of freely downloadable PDF data sheets and data books. The same is the case with most mechanical components catalogs and product information books. Open and free websites and/or PDF files have replaced the world of hard-copy manuals, books and catalogs.

And so the question might very well be: What are other book genres going to look like in ten, twenty, thirty or fifty years? It could very well be that book authors discover that they can earn a lot more money if their book is published digitally and made available openly while being supported by advertising or donations. While most would reject the idea of a 300 page PHP book with an add on every header or every page, the idea that this book would be free to the reader might change their viewpoint.

Catalog or data-book providers have an incentive for providing these book or documents for free: They are trying to sell you what's inside them. That transition was a no-brainer. Novels, fiction, business, political, hobby and other books might not have such strong tie-ins with revenue generating opportunities. This means that they have to make some money per unit sold (or unit read). Maybe all books will become websites with advertising and many opportunities to monetize them. And, at the same time, the reader will have the option to pay a nominal amount to turn off all advertising.

The idea of transferring ownership of digital assets to survivors might eventually translate into simply providing a list of the books, songs, etc. that the survivors can freely explore as a sample of what the deceased like to read or listen to. In the end, I think only a limited set of physical items hold sentimental value. As far as real monetary value, well, I think that books and records hardly count as investments save for very, very rare stuff.

In the past, the labls/publishers/whoever wanted to create content, be able to sell it, and have a monopoly on it. The way to do this was to sell physical instances of the creation, like books, DVDs, and CDs. This worked wonderfully, because it's simple for people to understand giving money over to receive a physical good, which you own, and which you can e.g. later sell, or transfer to your kids.

In short, the old way was: "buying" == "getting a physical copy of the media".

The problem is, since digital media arose, there has been a slow shift in the meaning of buying content. The producers are acting like "buying" no longer means "getting a physical copy of the media". They're acting like it means "having access to consume the media". E.g., buying a song from Queen means I get to listen to the song. It has nothing to do with having the physical file.

In other words, the new model is: "buying" == "getting the (legal) ability to consume the media".

This is true in many ways, both good and bad for the consumer.

The good is that, e.g., when I buy an audiobook on Audible, the physical file is irrelevant. I can delete it, and download it again. It's my ability to get the book that they're selling. I can have many physical copies of the book, on my computer/iPhone/laptop/whatever, and they're fine with it. The bad is that a lot of the rules for physical media are no longer relevant - I can't sell it, I can't lend it, I can't let people inherit.

Actually, this doesn't bother me much. Because I don't think of owning an Audiobook in the same way I think of owning a physical book. My thoughts are "I pay $10 to hear this book, once". Of course, this says a lot about me, because I don't have this same thought about ebooks - I do equate them to physical books.

My prediction is that the world will be going in a direction in which physical ownership of digital media is irrelevant. This has to happen, because of the way digital media works. People will be buying the "ability" to listen to songs, not buying actual songs. Programs like Amazon's "lend books" will be seem very antiquated and irrelevant. Arguably, the way these will work is by buying subscriptions to services, i.e. $10 for all the music you can listen to ala Spotify. I think this is the only way the world can go which will make sense to consumers, although I fear for the publishers.

(I know Amazon somehow let's you lend books for limited time but I'm talking about industry in general)

Spotify anyone?

Subscription services will eventually win over large locally owned media. It's so nice to have access to any song I want for $10 /month, without having to worry if my iPhone has enough storage to hold it all.

Who inherits my iTunes library (or kindle library etc etc)? My estate does.

Oh no - I have so much music that a physical storage model doesn't scale - in fact, I have so. much. music. that I can't afford to own it in physical media! I can only afford to license it for my lifetime! Whatever shall I do?

This isn't to say that transferable digital assets are unimportant, but just to point out that part of the reason people in previous generations did not suffer our terrible woes is that only very few of them tried to accumulate obscenely large collections. (I have 27 GB of music accumulated - that's 16 days of nonstop music. When I cast my eye over history, I am in the obscenely wealthy 0.001% (pick a number) who could command over two weeks of nonstop music on a whim. It's nothing less than obscene.)

If you keep a moderate library, there's nothing wrong with physical media.

That's one battle won, now we need to get rid of DRM for video and ebooks...

1. Are the rights under the EULA / ToS transferable due to terms explicitly in the EULA governing transferability?

2. If there are no explicit terms, what is the "default setting" for transferability?

3. Are the digital items being sold considered goods, services, or some combination? (I'd imagine it's much easier to terminate a contract for ongoing services than to negate heirs' rights to goods the deceased has purchased.)

4. Is there a catch-all "escape clause" in the EULA which says "We're allowed to terminate your right to access these songs or movies at any time for any reason, or no reason"?

5. What about the first sale doctrine? Doesn't it say that you have some right to transfer items regardless of what the EULA / ToS says?

From a practical standpoint, you can probably transfer the account by just giving the password to the receiving heir. Making new purchases on the old account may no longer be possible if they check to make sure the name on your credit card matches the name the account is registered to, but I'd imagine many providers don't do this check and only care about what your CC info says if they start getting chargebacks.

If you don't know the password and don't have access to the deceased's email to use the usual password reset mechanism, you may be facing an uphill battle.

It would also be a micromanagement nightmare to have several accounts on the same service with different content. It might also trigger provider's alarms if you access several different accounts from the same IP address (although if the number is reasonably small -- less than ten, let us say -- hopefully they'll assume it's legit, i.e. multiple accounts belonging to different people living in the same house with a single NAT'ed Internet connection.)

The simple fact of the matter is that most Web businesses' domain modeling assumes that customers live forever. What happens when they don't is basically anarchy. We're still at the point where most of the people who die never had a large online presence, but in 30-50 years that will no longer be true.

An ideal situation for content providers would be for all content to be destroyed when someone dies, because then the next generation would have to buy it if they wanted it instead of inheriting it. The problem is that this leads to cognitive dissonance, because heritability of possessions is a central feature of many cultures, including ours.

An ideal situation for consumers is complete transferability. The first problem is that this encourages piracy -- if there was a free and legal resale market where any song could be sold for (let us say) $0.50, while songs can be bought on iTunes for $1.00, iTunes would make exactly $1.00 on each song it released, because exactly one person would buy it, then resell it (keeping a local copy), and its buyer would resell it, etc. The second problem is that it's difficult for a company halfway around the country to differentiate between the legitimate heir of someone who's actually died and an account thief.