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Apple sued for terminating account with $25k worth of apps and videos

684 points by imgabe 6y ago

sneak 6y ago
All these "stores" have the same wording in their TOS: "this content is licensed, not sold", et c. They all use the terms "buy", "sale", "purchases", "owned", and other similar words in the UI. There's a clear contradiction here, and they shouldn't get it both ways. 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.
- strogonoff 6y ago
  Transferrable software/media licenses present a challenge that can be either a technical or a social/economical one. 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.
  - infogulch 6y ago
    Maybe this is the real killer use-case for NFTs?
    - xur17 6y ago
      Honestly, it is a decent use case. Sell NFTs that grant the owner the right to play / use a certain song, movie, ebook, etc. Ideally have some sort of file storage layer that only grants the ability to stream the content if you own the nft - not sure how feasible that is, so the alternative is to establish a few providers that can stream the content, and get paid a small amount for their services by the movie studios. 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.
    - strogonoff 6y ago
      I don’t like the approaches involving NFT (and blockchain in general) because no matter how you spin it, it’s ultimately following the zero interpersonal trust route.
- indymike 6y ago
  We should require that the person who is having an account terminated be compensated by refunding the purchase price, plus interest.
- heisenbit 6y ago
  Amazon at least here in Germany offers either to rent or to buy. Now whatever their ToS say, there is a certain expectation to the word "buy" and I'm fairly optimistic that courts here would take a dim view on clauses in ToS allowing a one sided revocation. Even if it is only a license to stream it is a property right. In B2B one may put some twisted clauses into contracts but in B2C such attempts are regularly reigned in.
realusername 6y ago
> Apple countered by arguing that “no reasonable consumer would believe” that content purchased through iTunes would be available on the platform indefinitely Remember this sentence to change your mind for the next time you see some movie to buy online.
- dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
  Really surprised to see Apple taking this approach. You'd think they could have come up with something less offensive to their users. This is the exact same line Sidney Powell is using in her defense against Dominion: "'No Reasonable Person' Thought Her Election Fraud Claims Were Fact" [0]. Amused but not surprised to see this from her, I am quite aghast to see this from Apple. The fact is, just like any reasonable person would believe that claims of election fraud are claims of election fraud, any reasonable person would certainly believe that when Apple says "buy" they mean to purchase and to own outright in perpetuity without the possibility of repossession. I wonder what effect this will have on the App Store, where apps are "sold" using the same language. [0] https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2021/03/22/facing-defamation-sidney-powell-says-no-reasonable-person-thought-her-election-fraud-claims-were-fact/ https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2021/03/22/facing-def...
  - lettergram 6y ago
    Not sure why Sidney Powell was brought up here, but that’s ongoing litigation and neither side has emerged victorious. Further, the claims in that article were odd and don’t seem to match the filing Sydney Powell actually made: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.225699/gov.uscourts.dcd.225699.22.2_3.pdf https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.225699/... So I don’t think that’s necessarily a great source to cite. EDIT: In either case, these are lawsuits. There’s a few things that have to occur in the Powell (and Apple) case: 1. Is it reasonable to believe the people making said statements or taking actions believe they are correct / the truth 2. Was there malicious intent (predicated on point 1). Those suing have to prove the statements are both (a) convincing to a 3rd party and (b) show the defendant was trying to take action contrary to their beliefs Because of the setup, it makes sense to basically say “prove a reasonable person believes the claims and prove the defended intended to cause harm, using evidence contrary to their beliefs” That’s equivalent to saying “prove it.” This is standard in a motion to dismiss, which is step one in the legal battle.
neallindsay 6y ago
Not the main point of the case, but I am curious how his account was terminated. Apple does that much less often than Google does (you're not posting death threats in YouTube comments using your Apple account). I'm also curious how he purchased $25k of apps and videos in only two years. 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.
- simion314 6y ago
  > but I am curious how his account was terminated. 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.
  - visarga 6y ago
    > 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.
ryandrake 6y ago
Wow, $25K and he did not have download access to a single bit. That's insane! I hope this goes to trial and sets a precedent. The word "buy" is extremely misleading when it comes to cloud content. Never buy anything that the manufacturer is allowed to later repossess or deny your access to!
- oblio 6y ago
  They should just force all these vendors to relabel those buttons to "Rent" or equivalent.
  - habibur 6y ago
    > They should just force all these vendors to relabel those buttons to "Rent" or equivalent. 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.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    IMO they should just forbid taking away access. You can't terminate the account. If someone does a chargeback, you can terminate access to what they charged back. You can forbid them to write any additional data in the future. You can decline to sell them anything more. You can sue them for any monies they owe you. But if you're providing property-like digital goods, you must give indefinite read-only access to those goods, even if the account is otherwise banned from interacting with your service.
    - Vespasian 6y ago
      This is how things should be and I really hope we arrive at this in the future. 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).
      - 6y ago
tareqak 6y ago
I think Apple and Amazon (an Amazon lawsuit is linked inside the article) will argue that they are similar to video rental stores like Blockbuster back when it was in business. However, Blockbuster did have physical copies of movies available to purchase in the form of VHS, and DVDs so I would argue that Blockbuster calling itself a store was still alright even though it might have done more business in rentals. 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.
- dukoid 6y ago
  I think the long term outcome will be some sort of account "locking" where the account becomes purely passive
- l-lousy 6y ago
  I think the main problem is that because the conditions of the rental are not known at the time that you make a purchase (accounts can be terminated at any time for any reason) you can’t call it rental or buying really.
- SuchAnonMuchWow 6y ago
  Also, blockbuster rental terms were clearly defined. For example you knew for how long you had the movie. 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.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Yeah, that's the hypothetical that should definitely be played up – "buying" a movie and Apple terminating your account 5 minutes later. Makes it exceedingly clear that this certainly isn't "buying" and calling it such is false advertising.
    - 6y ago
surfsvammel 6y ago
It seems I was fooled. I’m pretty tech savvy, but I guess I am naïve, I though my movies—no, I counted on my movies—being available to me indefinitely.
- hirundo 6y ago
  They are just available to you more indefinitely than you thought.
danaris 6y ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26912118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26912118
- jsnell 6y ago
  Not a dupe, I think? 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.
  - danaris 6y ago
    This article references two different suits, and the headline is about the second one, but at least at the time I posted this comment, the part nearly everyone was commenting on was the first suit, with the "no reasonable person" line, which is the same suit as in the previous article.
Diggsey 6y ago
IMO it wouldn't matter if they'd used the word "Rent" or "Licence" instead: it would still be unreasonable. Account termination is entirely at Apple's discretion, meaning the term of your "rental" is not known when you actually pay for the content. 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.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Or at least downgrade your "purchases" to "rental" price.
  - sideshowb 6y ago
    Sure a rental price determined by what the value of renting was according to the customer. Which, seeing as they opted to purchase, might reasonably be zero.
- 1cvmask 6y ago
  Do we know why his account was terminated? I couldn’t find anything on that.
  - ldiracdelta 6y ago
    People don't own the things they buy. They don't have property rights today. Today, a mob or a single unaccountable low-level account reviewer may declare someone an "out law" and anyone may do anything they like to him as is the old germanic tradition.
    - dalbasal 6y ago
      Orwell believed euphemisation was the key element of said tradition. Food for thought, perhaps. Not everything needs to be turned up to 11 all the time, explicitly or not. Chill.
    - 6y ago
bityard 6y ago
I hate to be so cynical, but here's exactly how this is going to play out, or I'll eat my hat: 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.
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  I'm afraid you might be right about 2, but wrt 1 I think you can absolutely sue your way out of a contract if it was made after blatantly false advertising, no?
  - thathndude 6y ago
    That’s correct. Am a lawyer, not giving legal advice. 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.
    - alisonkisk 6y ago
      That's what class actions are for. The lawyer and the class representative get paid for their work to pursue the case.
black_puppydog 6y ago
> class-action lawsuits over the meaning of the words “rent” and “buy.” 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
- 0_gravitas 6y ago
  this is also something that im sure many friends of mine are tired of me talking about. "buy/purchase it now!" buttons are far more effective marketing-wise than "license it now!", which is one of the reasons why these companies are going to hang on with all the claws they've got.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    Couldn't companies just put "Licence to watch..." in small print above the name of the movie/item and then still say "Buy now!" on the button, because you are buying the licence?
    - sellyme 6y ago
      In some countries, absolutely. 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.
fortran77 6y ago
I remember when I worked for Disney and they had some "lifetime" products, like "Leave a Legacy" (i.e., personalize a brick or small plaque in Epcot). If you read the fine print, they were only obligated to preserve your "legacy" for 20 years. 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-legacy-tiles-return-outside-park-gates-at-epcot/#:~:text=Those%20who%20left%20a%20legacy%20during%20EPCOT%E2%80%99s%20Millennium,the%20entrance%20of%20EPCOT%20was%20removed%20in%202019 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.
iamgopal 6y ago
So a service that provide and sync your content, and also allow you to buy the content, will work ? ( I.e can Dropbox be distributor ? )
xyst 6y ago
Apple could have avoided this issue entirely by allowing users to download the content without any DRM to a storage provider of their choice (ie, Dropbox, or local storage).
- daemoon 6y ago
  This is not even an option, since it will just make it easier to share files illegally and defeat the whole purpose of having an online movie store.
  - chii 6y ago
    it was already easy to obtain that very song or movie illegally. Allowing a download doesn't _cause_ more piracy - it just makes the user have more power and control over their content they purchased.
  - Oddskar 6y ago
    I disagree. Piracy was and still is very much a service problem. Just because people would have access to DRM-free movies does not mean they would automatically fire up bittorrent and start trading torrent files with their friends. That's still far too inconvenient. 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.
  - dawnerd 6y ago
    This line of reasoning is why we have invasive drm that doesn’t work. It’s just another case of drm only hurting legitimate customers and not stopping piracy even in the slightest.
- imgabe 6y ago
  Unfortunately, I don’t think this is Apple’s choice. I think the rights holders get to dictate whether people can download the things or not.
  - izacus 6y ago
tartoran 6y ago
I understood this thing long time ago and removed my credit card from my account to resist tempation of buying stuff. I briefly added it back to purchase an app or two I really couldn’t do without. As far as media goes I have none on my Iphone.
1cvmask 6y ago
Does anyone why they terminated his account?
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Generally speaking, the corporation can terminate your count for secret reasons, including violating any term of any service they offer, such as storing something that looks like offensive content.
  - indymike 6y ago
    I think the right remedy is returning the money for "owned" items should they terminate. The problem here is the decision to terminate the contract resulted in direct loss of property (or utility if you really believe buy should mean rent) without any compensation.
syshum 6y ago
Companies want people to be happy in a post-ownership society, Apple and Amazon are part of that I hope more people start resisting this narrative that all or our property and in essences our lives should be leased / rented...
- m-p-3 6y ago
  I'm okay if the terms of the rental or subscription are clearly defined. For example, I have no problem subscribing to Netflix and I expect to lose access to its library if I stop paying. 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.
  - syshum 6y ago
    Netflix/Spotify etc is not really part of a post ownership society, not the in the way it is envisioned by people that promote such thing 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
  - Jochim 6y ago
    I think having the option to rent or subscribe is fine and it might actually be of benefit to some people. However, there is a problem when the option to own a product disappears because a rental/subscription model is more profitable, which we're seeing more and more. It's a pretty strong example of corporate interests not lining up with human/societal interests.
karlkloss 6y ago
I don't know whether Apple/Google/Facebook-Oculus/Microsoft/Sony, etc. already noticed (most likely not), but I already stopped buying anything from them, for exactly the reason that they might terminate my account without even telling me why, and without a possibility to object or even talk to a human being. In an ideal world, everybody would do so, and the problem would go away very quickly.
peanut_worm 6y ago
Foolish consumers and their primitive notions of “ownership”.
015a 6y ago
I feel its fair to give content providers a few options, but they must be forced into it by our government by choosing one of: 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.
read_if_gay_ 6y ago
Weirdly, the “private companies can do what they want” angle seems pretty unpopular here.
- Vespasian 6y ago
  I suspect I know what you are implying. 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.
- anaganisk 6y ago
  Which is bound by laws too.
philip1209 6y ago
Is this Matthew Prince from CloudFlare?
loup-vaillant 6y ago
Nice. Now how about the Occulus Quest? 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).
- fastball 6y ago
  Now I want to buy an Occulus Quest and get banned by Facebook just so that I can file that suit.
FridayoLeary 6y ago
Even if Apple may be justified, I would expect more professionalism from such a large company. their PR image is certainly worth many multiples of $25000. By issuing their tone deaf statement about "no reasonable person etc" they are alienating many customers. even if the are legally 100% right, that's irrelevant. 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.
plank_time 6y ago
I have about 100 movies I’ve bought through iTunes so this is a very pertinent lawsuit for me. And no, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that I would have access to the movies forever.
- croutonwagon 6y ago
  > And no, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that I would have access to the movies forever. 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. )
lanevorockz 6y ago
I hope we start seeing government truly pushing back against big tech. They have become larger than countries and now just manage the tax evasions schemes that keep them so profitable.
deegles 6y ago
Apple: No True Scotsman would believe they actually purchased content when clicking a button labeled Buy.
Pxtl 6y ago
This is the reason why all my music and ebook purchases are on a file server in my house, and if a service doesn't offer those goods in a DRM-free format, they don't get my money.
cycomanic 6y ago
Maybe what people should do is "buy" the movie on itunes, watch it and then do a credit card charge-back (possibly for e.g. 90% of the amount) with the justification that they read the terms in detail and realised that they are just renting not owning the media. 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.
dawnerd 6y ago
I don’t understand the idea of terminating entire accounts anyways. All this companies need to be able to more finely disable access if needed. It’s gotten really bad now that your personal accounts can end up being tied to business services.
shrimpx 6y ago
Since I hold the more correct stance that these saas products are full of shit and can instantly disappear, I never dared to interpret “buy” as buy to own forever. To me “buy” on prime is “the other more expensive rent option when the cheaper rent is not available”.
charles_f 6y ago
Beyond the legality aspect of using the words "buy" or "purchase" is the moral one. Blocking access to content to a customer you got money from is immoral. To a certain point it's the exact opposite of piracy. If it's legal, it should be made illegal. 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.
kodah 6y ago
> Apple countered by arguing that “no reasonable consumer would believe” that content purchased through iTunes would be available on the platform indefinitely Color me unreasonable
Zelphyr 6y ago
I'm as big an Apple fan as they come but they've got some work to do in supporting their services. 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.
Dayshine 6y ago
Assuming things fall on the side of "indefinite access" that can't be revoked: 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..
- techsupporter 6y ago
  I doubt your first assumption will be the one that happens, even if this ruling does come out favorably for customers. 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.
- jeroenhd 6y ago
  You could terminate the account and refund the purchases in full, that way you can still get the user removed from your platform. Or, better yet, stop the unification of unrelated accounts and have a user be able to purchase and watch movies without necessarily having access to iCloud and such. 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).
  - microtherion 6y ago
    > You could terminate the account and refund the purchases in full 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.
    - jeroenhd 6y ago
      Perhaps the refund could not be the original full price, but the current sales price available. 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.
duckfang 6y ago
And folks, this is why I pirate. 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/ https://xkcd.com/488/ is eminently relevant.
dtx1 6y ago
Hot Take: Just pirate everything and be done with it. 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.
- codegladiator 6y ago
  > Suscription Services I like the term
  - dtx1 6y ago
    just a typo, but now i'm gonna keep it
  - smoldesu 6y ago
    When the cription Service is sus
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
  There is also plenty of media that isn't available via legal means.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  > 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. 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.
- LeoPanthera 6y ago
  You don't need to pirate it, you can just continue to buy physical media. CDs are unencrypted. The encryption on DVDs and blu-rays has long been broken. I continue to buy physical discs, rip them into my library, and then keep the discs as backups. It's the best of all worlds, and is both legal (in most places) and moral.
colllectorof 6y ago
The reality is that most big tech companies want to get all the benefits of "going digital", while shifting all the costs or downsides of that move to the consumers. This is not accidental. This is a long-term strategy backed by an elaborate PR campaign. The campaign was so successful that most people aren't even aware of how bizarre the whole idea of "renting" digital content really is. You're "renting" something that can be effortlessly replicated ad infinitum. 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-questions/ https://strawdogs.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/neil-postmans-6-q...
- sascha_sl 6y ago
  > You're "renting" something that can be effortlessly replicated ad infinitum. 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.
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    > 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. 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…)
joshspankit 6y ago
This might be the escape hatch from the ever-lowering spiked ceiling that is licensing instead of purchasing. If those “buy” and “purchase” buttons had to be replaced with “license”, then companies might start moving back towards actual purchases.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ok123456 6y ago
This is why I'll keep pirating content.
jerjerjer 6y ago
Good. These days when a lot of possessions are not physical, and not even bytes on a hard drive, but just some entries in some company database allowing you a limited access we need more rules than "companies are allowed to do whatever they want".
therealdrag0 6y ago
I don’t know much about DRM but seems like they should make it platform independent such that if you buy something from any store your digital rights transfer to any other service (with a small fee). Typically I’m anti blockchain, but perhaps there’s a use in here for it.
hparadiz 6y ago
This is why I don't buy anything on app stores ever.
macdice 6y ago
We were upset when content "bought" in the UK disappeared after we moved to NZ (specifically, I think it happened when we changed credit card billing address). We complained and they gave some of it back "at their discretion", but we weren't even sure what we'd lost. It seemed completely absurd that they used the word "buy" in this way.
ropable 6y ago
Is there a defined "age limit" on iTunes accounts (or any other digital asset account)? I don't know the ToS, but I assume that it's illegal to sell, trade or gift an iTunes account to someone else. Assuming that I continue to maintain such an account for the rest of my natural life, die, and then bequeath the account to someone, will there come a point where Apple says "this account is older than any human, therefore it is no longer a valid one and will be disabled"?
- hoppyhoppy2 6y ago
  Personal computing itself is not yet older than any human and iTunes is only 20, so it'll be a while yet before Apple has to make a decision based on whether an Apple account is older than any human. 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)
BooneJS 6y ago
It seems the prudent thing would be to allow access to existing material while preventing them from doing anything to their account besides changing the password.
balls187 6y ago
I actually had beef with Valve for doing something tangentially related. 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.
jaimex2 6y ago
I hope this ends with a legal requirement to refund all purchases if an account is ever terminated on digital platforms. 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"
codeisawesome 6y ago
> Apple also advertise the fact that consumers can keep their purchased files in the cloud for later download. And when using certain settings on iOS and Fire devices, Apple will automatically remove from a device content and apps that haven’t been accessed in a while, requiring the user to download them once more. 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.
gkanai 6y ago
This is why I choose not to purchase streaming services (at least for music.) I buy the tracks I want on CD or vinyl or download.
YeBanKo 6y ago
> Apple countered by arguing that “no reasonable consumer would believe” that content purchased through iTunes would be available on the platform indefinitely. 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.

684 points by imgabe 6y ago

All these "stores" have the same wording in their TOS: "this content is licensed, not sold", et c. They all use the terms "buy", "sale", "purchases", "owned", and other similar words in the UI. There's a clear contradiction here, and they shouldn't get it both ways. 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.

strogonoff 6y ago
Transferrable software/media licenses present a challenge that can be either a technical or a social/economical one. 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.
- infogulch 6y ago
  Maybe this is the real killer use-case for NFTs?
  - xur17 6y ago
    Honestly, it is a decent use case. Sell NFTs that grant the owner the right to play / use a certain song, movie, ebook, etc. Ideally have some sort of file storage layer that only grants the ability to stream the content if you own the nft - not sure how feasible that is, so the alternative is to establish a few providers that can stream the content, and get paid a small amount for their services by the movie studios. 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.
  - strogonoff 6y ago
    I don’t like the approaches involving NFT (and blockchain in general) because no matter how you spin it, it’s ultimately following the zero interpersonal trust route.
indymike 6y ago
We should require that the person who is having an account terminated be compensated by refunding the purchase price, plus interest.
heisenbit 6y ago
Amazon at least here in Germany offers either to rent or to buy. Now whatever their ToS say, there is a certain expectation to the word "buy" and I'm fairly optimistic that courts here would take a dim view on clauses in ToS allowing a one sided revocation. Even if it is only a license to stream it is a property right. In B2B one may put some twisted clauses into contracts but in B2C such attempts are regularly reigned in.

realusername 6y ago

> Apple countered by arguing that “no reasonable consumer would believe” that content purchased through iTunes would be available on the platform indefinitely Remember this sentence to change your mind for the next time you see some movie to buy online.

dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
Really surprised to see Apple taking this approach. You'd think they could have come up with something less offensive to their users. This is the exact same line Sidney Powell is using in her defense against Dominion: "'No Reasonable Person' Thought Her Election Fraud Claims Were Fact" [0]. Amused but not surprised to see this from her, I am quite aghast to see this from Apple. The fact is, just like any reasonable person would believe that claims of election fraud are claims of election fraud, any reasonable person would certainly believe that when Apple says "buy" they mean to purchase and to own outright in perpetuity without the possibility of repossession. I wonder what effect this will have on the App Store, where apps are "sold" using the same language. [0] https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2021/03/22/facing-defamation-sidney-powell-says-no-reasonable-person-thought-her-election-fraud-claims-were-fact/ https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2021/03/22/facing-def...
- lettergram 6y ago
  Not sure why Sidney Powell was brought up here, but that’s ongoing litigation and neither side has emerged victorious. Further, the claims in that article were odd and don’t seem to match the filing Sydney Powell actually made: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.225699/gov.uscourts.dcd.225699.22.2_3.pdf https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.225699/... So I don’t think that’s necessarily a great source to cite. EDIT: In either case, these are lawsuits. There’s a few things that have to occur in the Powell (and Apple) case: 1. Is it reasonable to believe the people making said statements or taking actions believe they are correct / the truth 2. Was there malicious intent (predicated on point 1). Those suing have to prove the statements are both (a) convincing to a 3rd party and (b) show the defendant was trying to take action contrary to their beliefs Because of the setup, it makes sense to basically say “prove a reasonable person believes the claims and prove the defended intended to cause harm, using evidence contrary to their beliefs” That’s equivalent to saying “prove it.” This is standard in a motion to dismiss, which is step one in the legal battle.

neallindsay 6y ago

Not the main point of the case, but I am curious how his account was terminated. Apple does that much less often than Google does (you're not posting death threats in YouTube comments using your Apple account). I'm also curious how he purchased $25k of apps and videos in only two years. 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.

simion314 6y ago
> but I am curious how his account was terminated. 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.
- visarga 6y ago
  > 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.

ryandrake 6y ago

Wow, $25K and he did not have download access to a single bit. That's insane! I hope this goes to trial and sets a precedent. The word "buy" is extremely misleading when it comes to cloud content. Never buy anything that the manufacturer is allowed to later repossess or deny your access to!

oblio 6y ago
They should just force all these vendors to relabel those buttons to "Rent" or equivalent.
- habibur 6y ago
  > They should just force all these vendors to relabel those buttons to "Rent" or equivalent. 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.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  IMO they should just forbid taking away access. You can't terminate the account. If someone does a chargeback, you can terminate access to what they charged back. You can forbid them to write any additional data in the future. You can decline to sell them anything more. You can sue them for any monies they owe you. But if you're providing property-like digital goods, you must give indefinite read-only access to those goods, even if the account is otherwise banned from interacting with your service.
  - Vespasian 6y ago
    This is how things should be and I really hope we arrive at this in the future. 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).
    - 6y ago

tareqak 6y ago

I think Apple and Amazon (an Amazon lawsuit is linked inside the article) will argue that they are similar to video rental stores like Blockbuster back when it was in business. However, Blockbuster did have physical copies of movies available to purchase in the form of VHS, and DVDs so I would argue that Blockbuster calling itself a store was still alright even though it might have done more business in rentals. 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.

dukoid 6y ago
I think the long term outcome will be some sort of account "locking" where the account becomes purely passive
l-lousy 6y ago
I think the main problem is that because the conditions of the rental are not known at the time that you make a purchase (accounts can be terminated at any time for any reason) you can’t call it rental or buying really.
SuchAnonMuchWow 6y ago
Also, blockbuster rental terms were clearly defined. For example you knew for how long you had the movie. 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.
- fastball 6y ago
  Yeah, that's the hypothetical that should definitely be played up – "buying" a movie and Apple terminating your account 5 minutes later. Makes it exceedingly clear that this certainly isn't "buying" and calling it such is false advertising.
  - 6y ago

surfsvammel 6y ago

It seems I was fooled. I’m pretty tech savvy, but I guess I am naïve, I though my movies—no, I counted on my movies—being available to me indefinitely.

hirundo 6y ago
They are just available to you more indefinitely than you thought.

danaris 6y ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26912118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26912118

jsnell 6y ago
Not a dupe, I think? 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.
- danaris 6y ago
  This article references two different suits, and the headline is about the second one, but at least at the time I posted this comment, the part nearly everyone was commenting on was the first suit, with the "no reasonable person" line, which is the same suit as in the previous article.

Diggsey 6y ago

IMO it wouldn't matter if they'd used the word "Rent" or "Licence" instead: it would still be unreasonable. Account termination is entirely at Apple's discretion, meaning the term of your "rental" is not known when you actually pay for the content. 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.

alisonkisk 6y ago
Or at least downgrade your "purchases" to "rental" price.
- sideshowb 6y ago
  Sure a rental price determined by what the value of renting was according to the customer. Which, seeing as they opted to purchase, might reasonably be zero.
1cvmask 6y ago
Do we know why his account was terminated? I couldn’t find anything on that.
- ldiracdelta 6y ago
  People don't own the things they buy. They don't have property rights today. Today, a mob or a single unaccountable low-level account reviewer may declare someone an "out law" and anyone may do anything they like to him as is the old germanic tradition.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    Orwell believed euphemisation was the key element of said tradition. Food for thought, perhaps. Not everything needs to be turned up to 11 all the time, explicitly or not. Chill.
  - 6y ago

bityard 6y ago

I hate to be so cynical, but here's exactly how this is going to play out, or I'll eat my hat: 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.

black_puppydog 6y ago
I'm afraid you might be right about 2, but wrt 1 I think you can absolutely sue your way out of a contract if it was made after blatantly false advertising, no?
- thathndude 6y ago
  That’s correct. Am a lawyer, not giving legal advice. 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.
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    That's what class actions are for. The lawyer and the class representative get paid for their work to pursue the case.

black_puppydog 6y ago

> class-action lawsuits over the meaning of the words “rent” and “buy.” 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

0_gravitas 6y ago
this is also something that im sure many friends of mine are tired of me talking about. "buy/purchase it now!" buttons are far more effective marketing-wise than "license it now!", which is one of the reasons why these companies are going to hang on with all the claws they've got.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  Couldn't companies just put "Licence to watch..." in small print above the name of the movie/item and then still say "Buy now!" on the button, because you are buying the licence?
  - sellyme 6y ago
    In some countries, absolutely. 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.

fortran77 6y ago

I remember when I worked for Disney and they had some "lifetime" products, like "Leave a Legacy" (i.e., personalize a brick or small plaque in Epcot). If you read the fine print, they were only obligated to preserve your "legacy" for 20 years. 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-legacy-tiles-return-outside-park-gates-at-epcot/#:~:text=Those%20who%20left%20a%20legacy%20during%20EPCOT%E2%80%99s%20Millennium,the%20entrance%20of%20EPCOT%20was%20removed%20in%202019 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.

iamgopal 6y ago

So a service that provide and sync your content, and also allow you to buy the content, will work ? ( I.e can Dropbox be distributor ? )

xyst 6y ago

Apple could have avoided this issue entirely by allowing users to download the content without any DRM to a storage provider of their choice (ie, Dropbox, or local storage).

daemoon 6y ago
This is not even an option, since it will just make it easier to share files illegally and defeat the whole purpose of having an online movie store.
- chii 6y ago
  it was already easy to obtain that very song or movie illegally. Allowing a download doesn't _cause_ more piracy - it just makes the user have more power and control over their content they purchased.
- Oddskar 6y ago
  I disagree. Piracy was and still is very much a service problem. Just because people would have access to DRM-free movies does not mean they would automatically fire up bittorrent and start trading torrent files with their friends. That's still far too inconvenient. 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.
- dawnerd 6y ago
  This line of reasoning is why we have invasive drm that doesn’t work. It’s just another case of drm only hurting legitimate customers and not stopping piracy even in the slightest.
imgabe 6y ago
Unfortunately, I don’t think this is Apple’s choice. I think the rights holders get to dictate whether people can download the things or not.
- izacus 6y ago

tartoran 6y ago

I understood this thing long time ago and removed my credit card from my account to resist tempation of buying stuff. I briefly added it back to purchase an app or two I really couldn’t do without. As far as media goes I have none on my Iphone.

1cvmask 6y ago

Does anyone why they terminated his account?

alisonkisk 6y ago
Generally speaking, the corporation can terminate your count for secret reasons, including violating any term of any service they offer, such as storing something that looks like offensive content.
- indymike 6y ago
  I think the right remedy is returning the money for "owned" items should they terminate. The problem here is the decision to terminate the contract resulted in direct loss of property (or utility if you really believe buy should mean rent) without any compensation.

syshum 6y ago

Companies want people to be happy in a post-ownership society, Apple and Amazon are part of that I hope more people start resisting this narrative that all or our property and in essences our lives should be leased / rented...

m-p-3 6y ago
I'm okay if the terms of the rental or subscription are clearly defined. For example, I have no problem subscribing to Netflix and I expect to lose access to its library if I stop paying. 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.
- syshum 6y ago
  Netflix/Spotify etc is not really part of a post ownership society, not the in the way it is envisioned by people that promote such thing 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
- Jochim 6y ago
  I think having the option to rent or subscribe is fine and it might actually be of benefit to some people. However, there is a problem when the option to own a product disappears because a rental/subscription model is more profitable, which we're seeing more and more. It's a pretty strong example of corporate interests not lining up with human/societal interests.

karlkloss 6y ago

I don't know whether Apple/Google/Facebook-Oculus/Microsoft/Sony, etc. already noticed (most likely not), but I already stopped buying anything from them, for exactly the reason that they might terminate my account without even telling me why, and without a possibility to object or even talk to a human being. In an ideal world, everybody would do so, and the problem would go away very quickly.

peanut_worm 6y ago

Foolish consumers and their primitive notions of “ownership”.

015a 6y ago

I feel its fair to give content providers a few options, but they must be forced into it by our government by choosing one of: 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.

read_if_gay_ 6y ago

Weirdly, the “private companies can do what they want” angle seems pretty unpopular here.

Vespasian 6y ago
I suspect I know what you are implying. 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.
anaganisk 6y ago
Which is bound by laws too.

philip1209 6y ago

Is this Matthew Prince from CloudFlare?

loup-vaillant 6y ago

Nice. Now how about the Occulus Quest? 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).

fastball 6y ago
Now I want to buy an Occulus Quest and get banned by Facebook just so that I can file that suit.

FridayoLeary 6y ago

Even if Apple may be justified, I would expect more professionalism from such a large company. their PR image is certainly worth many multiples of $25000. By issuing their tone deaf statement about "no reasonable person etc" they are alienating many customers. even if the are legally 100% right, that's irrelevant. 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.

plank_time 6y ago

I have about 100 movies I’ve bought through iTunes so this is a very pertinent lawsuit for me. And no, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that I would have access to the movies forever.

croutonwagon 6y ago
> And no, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that I would have access to the movies forever. 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. )

lanevorockz 6y ago

I hope we start seeing government truly pushing back against big tech. They have become larger than countries and now just manage the tax evasions schemes that keep them so profitable.

deegles 6y ago

Apple: No True Scotsman would believe they actually purchased content when clicking a button labeled Buy.

Pxtl 6y ago

This is the reason why all my music and ebook purchases are on a file server in my house, and if a service doesn't offer those goods in a DRM-free format, they don't get my money.

cycomanic 6y ago

Maybe what people should do is "buy" the movie on itunes, watch it and then do a credit card charge-back (possibly for e.g. 90% of the amount) with the justification that they read the terms in detail and realised that they are just renting not owning the media. 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.

dawnerd 6y ago

I don’t understand the idea of terminating entire accounts anyways. All this companies need to be able to more finely disable access if needed. It’s gotten really bad now that your personal accounts can end up being tied to business services.

shrimpx 6y ago

Since I hold the more correct stance that these saas products are full of shit and can instantly disappear, I never dared to interpret “buy” as buy to own forever. To me “buy” on prime is “the other more expensive rent option when the cheaper rent is not available”.

charles_f 6y ago

Beyond the legality aspect of using the words "buy" or "purchase" is the moral one. Blocking access to content to a customer you got money from is immoral. To a certain point it's the exact opposite of piracy. If it's legal, it should be made illegal. 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.

kodah 6y ago

> Apple countered by arguing that “no reasonable consumer would believe” that content purchased through iTunes would be available on the platform indefinitely Color me unreasonable

Zelphyr 6y ago

I'm as big an Apple fan as they come but they've got some work to do in supporting their services. 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.

Dayshine 6y ago

Assuming things fall on the side of "indefinite access" that can't be revoked: 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..

techsupporter 6y ago
I doubt your first assumption will be the one that happens, even if this ruling does come out favorably for customers. 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.
jeroenhd 6y ago
You could terminate the account and refund the purchases in full, that way you can still get the user removed from your platform. Or, better yet, stop the unification of unrelated accounts and have a user be able to purchase and watch movies without necessarily having access to iCloud and such. 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).
- microtherion 6y ago
  > You could terminate the account and refund the purchases in full 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.
  - jeroenhd 6y ago
    Perhaps the refund could not be the original full price, but the current sales price available. 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.

duckfang 6y ago

And folks, this is why I pirate. 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/ https://xkcd.com/488/ is eminently relevant.

dtx1 6y ago

Hot Take: Just pirate everything and be done with it. 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.

codegladiator 6y ago
> Suscription Services I like the term
- dtx1 6y ago
  just a typo, but now i'm gonna keep it
- smoldesu 6y ago
  When the cription Service is sus
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
There is also plenty of media that isn't available via legal means.
heavyset_go 6y ago
> 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. 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.
LeoPanthera 6y ago
You don't need to pirate it, you can just continue to buy physical media. CDs are unencrypted. The encryption on DVDs and blu-rays has long been broken. I continue to buy physical discs, rip them into my library, and then keep the discs as backups. It's the best of all worlds, and is both legal (in most places) and moral.

colllectorof 6y ago

The reality is that most big tech companies want to get all the benefits of "going digital", while shifting all the costs or downsides of that move to the consumers. This is not accidental. This is a long-term strategy backed by an elaborate PR campaign. The campaign was so successful that most people aren't even aware of how bizarre the whole idea of "renting" digital content really is. You're "renting" something that can be effortlessly replicated ad infinitum. 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-questions/ https://strawdogs.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/neil-postmans-6-q...

sascha_sl 6y ago
> You're "renting" something that can be effortlessly replicated ad infinitum. 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.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  > 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. 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…)

joshspankit 6y ago

This might be the escape hatch from the ever-lowering spiked ceiling that is licensing instead of purchasing. If those “buy” and “purchase” buttons had to be replaced with “license”, then companies might start moving back towards actual purchases.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ok123456 6y ago

This is why I'll keep pirating content.

jerjerjer 6y ago

Good. These days when a lot of possessions are not physical, and not even bytes on a hard drive, but just some entries in some company database allowing you a limited access we need more rules than "companies are allowed to do whatever they want".

therealdrag0 6y ago

I don’t know much about DRM but seems like they should make it platform independent such that if you buy something from any store your digital rights transfer to any other service (with a small fee). Typically I’m anti blockchain, but perhaps there’s a use in here for it.

hparadiz 6y ago

This is why I don't buy anything on app stores ever.

macdice 6y ago

We were upset when content "bought" in the UK disappeared after we moved to NZ (specifically, I think it happened when we changed credit card billing address). We complained and they gave some of it back "at their discretion", but we weren't even sure what we'd lost. It seemed completely absurd that they used the word "buy" in this way.

ropable 6y ago

Is there a defined "age limit" on iTunes accounts (or any other digital asset account)? I don't know the ToS, but I assume that it's illegal to sell, trade or gift an iTunes account to someone else. Assuming that I continue to maintain such an account for the rest of my natural life, die, and then bequeath the account to someone, will there come a point where Apple says "this account is older than any human, therefore it is no longer a valid one and will be disabled"?

hoppyhoppy2 6y ago
Personal computing itself is not yet older than any human and iTunes is only 20, so it'll be a while yet before Apple has to make a decision based on whether an Apple account is older than any human. 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)

BooneJS 6y ago

It seems the prudent thing would be to allow access to existing material while preventing them from doing anything to their account besides changing the password.

balls187 6y ago

I actually had beef with Valve for doing something tangentially related. 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.

jaimex2 6y ago

I hope this ends with a legal requirement to refund all purchases if an account is ever terminated on digital platforms. 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"

codeisawesome 6y ago

> Apple also advertise the fact that consumers can keep their purchased files in the cloud for later download. And when using certain settings on iOS and Fire devices, Apple will automatically remove from a device content and apps that haven’t been accessed in a while, requiring the user to download them once more. 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.

gkanai 6y ago

This is why I choose not to purchase streaming services (at least for music.) I buy the tracks I want on CD or vinyl or download.

YeBanKo 6y ago

> Apple countered by arguing that “no reasonable consumer would believe” that content purchased through iTunes would be available on the platform indefinitely. 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.