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.
Seriously. It's well past time that Congress passes a law explicitly to that effect -- if you lose access to purchased content, whether because your account was terminated or the content was removed, you get 100% refunded. End of story. Any TOS to the contrary are invalid.
Refunds aren't sufficient, you are owed whatever the replacement cost is.
If the good is no longer available except for at 10x or 100x the price, you are owed that. If the good is no longer available at any price, but the person with the liability is capable of making it available, they should be required to do so (or negotiate a contract with you that buys out your rights, but you should be free to decline that or to set whatever price you want).
This is especially relevant in the digital realm where it's an especially effective tactic to undercharge to try and starve competitors, and then raise prices.
As other already pointed out, this should only apply to DRM media. DRM-free should imply that the customer is responsible for it once the transfer is done.
Content gets removed from Netflix all the time, especially after they pivoted to their own production versus hosting content produced by others. How much should I get back?
How much should that digital content cost then? Make a DVD once, never think about it again. To offer digital copy that loses no value over time and must be available forever seems like a bad deal from the publisher's side.
To offer a one time download code seems far more tenable.
> It's simple: if apple want to terminate your account, they need to refund you for any content you lose access to as a result of that termination.
I like that idea a lot. I would add that, at the very, very least, they should give you a personal link to download a snapshot of all of your data from their cloud at the time of termination: email, calendar, contacts, photos/videos, docs, et. al.
The problem is more the licensed content such as movies and music. They likely can't provide it to you in a format sans DRM. So even having the option to download the file, will likely require the media to verify online to unlock at playtime.
I would add that, at the very, very least, they should give you a personal link to download a snapshot of all of your data from their cloud at the time of termination: email, calendar, contacts, photos/videos, docs, et. al.
As a point of interest, in the EU and UK, they probably would be legally required to do something like that for things like mail and calendars, because the GDPR says, roughly speaking, that they have an obligation to keep the data reasonably safe and an obligation to let the data subject have it in some useful format. I doubt those obligations would extend to other creative works you'd purchased, though, since among other things that would drive a coach and horses through international copyright agreements and several reasonable business models built on the resulting legal framework.
Apple can just rent you their entire catalogue similar to Apple Arcade or Music, then nobody would say you own the entire selection, just like it’d be absurd to say you own Netflix forever.
In the Netflix case it’s be even more difficult to argue since Netflix doesn’t own the IP and the catalogue is ever shifting. I’m afraid the future is rental at least because the consumer is no longer technically prepared to own and manage their own digital catalogue.
I think this is easy to resolve. With Netflix, the terms are that you pay a fixed amount and you get one month's access to stream whatever they choose to offer at the time, repeat. If Netflix terminates your account, well, you lose out on less than a month of access, so they should refund one month.
It's very different if (a) you pay per individual item, (b) there's an explicit or implied agreement that you have access to that item indefinitely. Then if your account is terminated, you should be refunded the value of having access indefinitely, which is the original purchase price.
Now maybe you're saying Apple can go to a subscription service where it rents "access" to the library, but those are very different terms.
Could this lead to people intentionally violating terms to try to get their account terminated so that they can get money back for every in app purchase, etc, they've ever made?
Yes which is why this won't ever happen. It should just be illegal to wholly terminate an account. If someone is breaking ToS, ban them from doing the ToS breaking thing like posting or commenting. No reason to terminate the entire account.
It shouldn't matter. If you're banned from going to a particular physical store for whatever reason, wrongly or not, you still get to keep everything you've ever bought there. If a physical store goes out of business, you also get to keep everything you've ever bought there.
Point being, IRL stores don't retain any control over anything you buy.
> Price says that Apple terminated his account when the company suspected him of breaching its terms and conditions, but due to the clause in question Apple did not have to confirm a breach occurred or give Price notice or explanation before shutting down his Apple ID. [0]
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.
Hypothetically; what if Apple were to cease to exist? Or wanted to discontinue their streaming services? Assuming Apple were in such a position, their financial outlook would probably not be good. They would likely be financially unable to reimburse that many subscribers.
It would be Apple's (or the bankruptcy court's) responsibility to transfer the access to a competitor's service, in exchange for payment or liquidation proceeds.
In fact, I'd argue that this ought to be the norm -- that content providers be forced to purchase insurance or something precisely in case they go out of business, to ensure customers will have their content migrated to another service, and be refunded for the small proportion of content that isn't available anywhere else.
The same way it works when a bankrupt company can't pay an invoice. You can sue a company if it doesn't hold its financial obligations, and get your money, and so can the customer, like in this case.
When a company goes bust, if you are owed money by that company, you put in claims to the estate, and the administrators handle those claims according to a well specified priority list. The customers being reimbursed is part of that process. However, I know that gift cards and store credit tend to be at the bottom of the list, so I wouldn't have high hopes for digital assets being reimbursed either.
> 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.
Well, not quite that simple, since a lot of people would de facto also lose access to their hardware and all work which relies on this software-hardware-combination.
Likely all that would do is cause them to stop letting people buy content and push everyone over to subscription services -
Beyond that, there are problems there. What’s stopping me from getting all the latest games on iOS, latest movies as they come out then after a few years spend some time purposely breaking TOS so I can get it all refunded.
Imagine you bought a bunch of physical books from Barnes and Noble, and then later did something to get yourself banned from all of their stores for life. (If it matters, assume that what you did was bad and that the ban was totally justifiable.) Would it be okay if they broke into your house and glued together the pages of all the books they ever bought, or would you sue them for compensation for doing that?
There's no reason Apple has to cut off access to your content even if they ban the rest of your account.
They could just set a flag on your account to "consume only" or something. Your account would be banned from "interaction" or further purchases, but you wouldn't lose your content.
Why is this a problem? If they take access of things you’ve bought, they should have to give you’re money back. Any breaking of the TOS in the future shouldn’t change that whether or not you’re purposefully trying to break them.
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.
> 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.
I always assumed they would be available as long as Apple or iTunes doesn't go under. Guess i'm not a reasonable consumer but luckily I haven't spent much money on them.
Apple and friends will do their best to avoid a ruling and laws which could establish this interpretation because it would end their practice to terminate accounts with the reason "Computer says no".
When contracting with consumers these companies should be forced to be liable and accountable for their algorithmic decisions and arbitrary policy enforcement.
That wouldn't be unreasonable at all. "They clicked the accept EULA button" is not a valid excuse.
Pretending that consumers are able to negotiate a fair contract with Apple is denying reality.
I've spent a lot of money on iTunes content (Nearing 1,000 purchased movies on AppleTV), and my assumption was the same. As long as Apple/iTunes doesn't go under, and given I don't do anything to violate Apple's terms, I will have access to this content.
I understand I can lose access, I'm not paying for the content in the idea that I own it forever even if Apple goes under or I get terminated, but I have perpetual access to it given the circumstances don't change, and I pay for the convenience of this.
If I had expected to own it forever, I'd probably have bought DVD's, not digital.
> Guess i'm not a reasonable consumer but luckily I haven't spent much money on them.
I used to have an account on which I spent at least $400. After an attempt to change the email address associated to the account I got locked out. It seems the same email address was used to create a different account in the past and the move just destroyed my access and any possible recourse.
So I switched to Android and stayed on Android for the last 7 years. No more iPhones for me, just remembering how my content got stolen makes me turn away.
I used to be a big fan of iPhones when they came out, even had a first gen iPhone a couple of months after launch. But after losing access to my content it all turned into the feeling that I am being abused.
> Remember this sentence to change your mind for the next time you see some movie to buy online.
If you use iTunes, and "add to library," like I do, you'll see how often albums get removed or replaced or remixed. It's unnecessary and unnerving. The labels are constantly faffing about with albums. Every couple of months, I'll go to play an album, and find that it only has, say, 2 songs in it. Sometimes I can go back and re-add it to my library, sometimes, there's a new "remastered" copy, and sometimes those songs are just no longer available in iTunes. I pay for the subscription, and don't buy music. And I'm glad. I don't know why these changes wouldn't happen to me even if I had paid for it, but maybe that would be exempted? If someone can tell me that this doesn't happen if I buy the album, I would snatch up some of my favorites right away.
I have "purchased" movies from Amazon, movies for which Amazon later lost streaming rights, and which are no longer in their catalogue - and so my "purchase" was temporary. I am sure their EULA expressly permits this but it's irrelevant now as I have learned my lesson. I now longer "purchase" digital products unless I can download them after purchase. When this first occurred, I was angry. Now, I just consider myself educated to avoid Amazon at all cost.
I do not think consumers know this at all and very much do agree that what they buy will be available to them during their lifetime at least. When I told friends that this can (and does) happen to books on Kindle that they paid for, they were very surprised. I am a reasonable consumer but yes, of course I assume that if it does not say 'rent this movie or book for a day' but instead uses the word 'buy' (often next to the button rent, so they they are making a distinction!), it will not dissapear. If it does disappear, I should get a refund, no matter the reason for it disappearing.
If it was an object in your house, and they made it disappear and left you some money, that would be theft.
Thoughts?
I'm not convinced 'making digital goods disappear' is good. I know WHY it's done and totally understand the justification, but I continue to dislike and distrust the practice.
Should we normalize the idea that everything we own is fungible, at the discretion of a third party, for its exchange value? Under what conditions do they get to swap out our property for replacements or money?
Seems crazy to me. Sure, all their content won't always be available to purchase. But once you've purchased something, how can that not always stay in your library? It is just a long term rental, not a purchase, if it can disappear and that isn't obvious to anybody without looking into it (and how should you know to look into it in the first place?)
Amazon argues the same exact thing if you buy a movie digitally from them. It's only available to you for as long as they host it on their servers. This is why I pirate shit that I can't find on Netflix or Prime Video. Buying digital content is merely "long term rental" and really needs to be better advertised as that.
I stopped seeing any value in purchasing/renting rights to movies and shows from the streaming giants. Want to watch The Office, sorry removed, no longer on Netflix. Oh, you are in a country that has a funny name, content not available in your region. Oh, you are trying to access your Hulu subscription from a Linux device? Max video res capped at 480p. It is such anti-consumer moves that makes me not feel bad for pirating.
IMO, the most maximum returns on home media consumption is gained by acquiring and archiving your own collection of media. I don't have to ask anyone for a license to watch my favorite movie from 1999 when I have the copy on my plex.
I wonder if we will ever see a model similar to Qobuz/Bandcamp for movies and TV shows. These services allow downloading your purchases as DRM-free flac files.
Conversely, I think a lot of people buy digital movies and never watch them because they want to own them. We all probably have friends who buy games they never play off of steam.
>> Apple countered by arguing that “no reasonable consumer would believe” that content purchased through iTunes would be available on the platform indefinitely.
I guess I will soon start a site about the amount of crap and hypocrisy modern Apple are saying. I dont know exactly what happened but post Steve Jobs Apple are getting ridiculous with their defence.
>> 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.
I read this as "no reasonable consumer would trust us".
That's the "Tucker Carlson defense".[1] "The Court concludes that the statements are rhetorical hyperbole and opinion commentary intended to frame a political debate, and, as such, are not actionable as defamation."
That worked in a defamation case, but the First Amendment defense probably won't work in a false advertising case.
I do. This is the exact reason why I've never bought anything digitally. Paying real money just to have some bytes streamed to you just doesn't feel right. And, I mean, you can't even resell or lend the thing.
University libraries all over the world would disagree, their archivists make very sure that digital journals are still available to their audience even if the subscription has expired. Access to digital content is a solved problem, even though Apple would have you believe otherwise.
How does this work? Is it normal for university libraries to keep a huge secret backup collection of PDFs? What happens if the university chooses to discontinue its subscription, as opposed to the publisher going out of business?
Historically media has had a limited play-life. 78s, 45s and 33 warped, broke or got scratched, etc., tapes wore out, broke, got tangled etc., CDs scratched or deteriorated after some time. There are exceptional specimens for all the above, but a good number don’t survive long unless owned by an aficionado who took care of their media.
With digital you can have backups and in theory they could last forever as you convert the format into whatever is popular.
How do they price this? Do they not do CRCs and hashes and let your bits rot over time and have you buy a new one? How do you approach this commercially? Make music or video very, very faddish so even if it lasts forever no one will want to listen to or watch something out of style ten yeas hence?
I’m not defending Apple. I’m asking how do you price things reasonably if they potentially last forever?
> I’m asking how do you price things reasonably if they potentially last forever?
They can potentially last forever, but humans don't. Since Apple's stuff is associated to a personal account, I don't see an issue here, vinyls can also last for a life.
On the other hand, consumers have lost the right to lend, give or sell the stuff they buy. That's not priced either, and we see every possible move be done to make these operations user-hostile, if not forbidden.
For CD’s it’s legal to make backup copies in the US which are digital and thus don’t degrade.
Many of the oldest recordings still work, and can be played indefinitely with an optical needle. The time value of money means the possible purchase by a small fraction of buyers 20+ years out isn’t worth much at the time of sale. It’s only moving forward in time that makes anyone care about these sales.
How do you price real estate when it lasts forever? (The land, not the buildings)
Of course there's an actual answer to this as well, the economic concept of a discount rate; things far in the future are worth less than they are in the present, by an amount depending on interest minus inflation.
I don't know. I have many tapes at home.~15-25 years old. I almost never touch them, but when i do they seem to work fine. Maybe the quality is bad, but i have nothing to compare it to.
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.
> 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.
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.
ive never been able to stomach that idea of having a physical collection of all my favourite movies or albums. some day in the future when you kick the bucket they will all be thrown out. maybe if you are lucky they might be sold off to some other collector or recycled but i would bet that eventually a lot of it will end up in a landfill somewhere.
it just seems like such an absurd idea that everyone would have their own collection of media like this. all of that plastic being generated and then eventually thrown out just so you can have a dvd sit on a shelf where you will use it once every few years, once a decade or maybe once and then never again.
i don't know if moral is a word i would use to describe all that
How inconvenient. Waiting for a CD/DVD to be delivered, ripping and cracking, saving it to my NAS where it cost even more money in form of storage space vs having a 5$/month vpn a raspberry pi with a harddrive connnected to it and just clicking download for whatever i need, whenever i want. The Idea of netflix and other streaming services is geat, i really like it, it's just the cable-tv-packagification that annoys me.
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.
In general, contracts can say literally whatever they want, and it doesn't mean they will stand up in court. If the court agrees that Apple selling $25k worth of stuff and denying access to it isn't "fair", then it isn't fair, end of story, regardless of what the contract says. The court might of course disagree, but you can't be certain until the case happens.
I do however believe that Apple will just settle this out of court, specifically to avoid such a ruling.
Well then Apple will win in the US but not in the EU when they get sued there. In the EU you cannot bind someone to have less rights by hiding it somewhere in an EULA. If the button says Buy then legally you buy no matter what any contract says in small letters somewhere.
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?
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.
Well, that's what the court case is about. I would certainly _like_ for the result of the case to be either Apple (Amazon, et al) stops using the word "Buy" in their apps, or better yet but even more unlikely, for the companies to start providing media as DRM-free downloads.
But like I said: the cynic in me says neither is going to happen.
That's why we have laws about "contracts of adhesion" that limit the one-sided news of contracts. The law has a general protection against "unconscionable" contracts, to be decided by judge or jury.
Click wrapped Terms of Service like that need to be ruled as Unenforceable Unconscionable contracts as they are clearly soo one sided they can not be seen by any reasonable person to be enforceable
In an ideal world, the FTC and attorneys general around the US would hold Apple and Amazon accountable for screwing over consumers this blatantly if they did this.
> 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
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.
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?
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:
People are so happy that they are fine with not finding their liked/fav songs regularly on Spotify even after they notice it has gone missing.
And they also kinda accept the mediocre recommendation (often laden with ads and "place in front" for pay content) which just feels like habit after a while.
Wouldn't say people are happy. "They accept" is much closer. They accept the mediocre, because there's nothing they can do about it, and they don't understand how any of it works.
> People are so happy that they are fine with not finding their liked/fav songs regularly on Spotify even after they notice it has gone missing.
I'd believe they were actually happy if there was a streaming service that actually didn't have content randomly disappear like it does on Spotify, and if customers still liked Spotify more.
To me, at least, it seems like consumers don't have many choices. They have to compromise with Spotify and others dropping content at the whims of rights holders.
It’s particularly noticeable on spotify. I actually don’t mind the rental model (though it’s overpriced for how I use it), but you cannot remove songs from curated playlists and expect me not to notice.
The concept of renting alone is not bad - I mean, they have something you want (e.g. movie), you pay to watch it, then you don't need it anymore. Tried and true concept, same as me renting a tool from Home Depot - I use it for a day, then I don't need it anymore. It doesn't matter how replicable it is - when I use it, I don't care much about whether Home Depot has more tools like that.
What is ridiculous is that they pretend the other option - "buying" - which is usually much more costly - is anything close to what people mean by "buying" in a non-digital non-DRM world. If I buy a book, the book is mine. I can read it forever, I can sell it, I can use it as a doorstopper if I like, but whatever I do it's mine. If I "buy" a movie on DRM platform, I can watch is only as long as the platform allows me to, and yet most people do not realize the profound difference. I think it's a good thing there's now a growing awareness that his is false pretense and it's time to shine a light on it.
> 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.
>> 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.
When I pay for a book in a bookstore, part of the money goes towards maintaining the system that produces and distributes books. The system includes various parties, like printers, publishers, distributors, books stores and so on. It's far more than 10% and there is nothing wrong with paying for a reasonably working distributed system like that.
Replacing all of those companies with a single megacorp like Amazon or Apple is not going to result in the same system running cheaper. It will create an entirely different system. Over time that new system will shift to publish entirely different type of content, it will have an entirely different relationship with consumers and authors and it will have completely different effect on the society at large. Given what I see already, I seriously doubt those changes will skew towards the positive.
> 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.
It's true the physical book manufacturing is only ~10% of the price.
But you're forgetting costs of shipping, warehousing, stocking, retail, etc. Separate from manufacturing, roughly 40% of what you pay for a book goes to the physical retailer, and that's actually the largest chunk.
When you add up all the costs of producing and transporting and selling the physical book to a customer (and the publisher taking back unsold copies), they make up the majority of a book's cost.
The actual "license of content" cost of a physical book is a minority of the price you pay.
But with a book, you have that privilege in perpetuity, and you can loan, transfer, and resell it.
Coincidentally, NFT’s got the “transfer” side of the equation, but forgot about the “privilege” part! The tokens are yours in perpetuity, and can be transferred to others, but it’s not at all clear what privilege they provide.
> 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…)
>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.
Except you're not renting books or optical media. You're buying them, and you can resell them or loan them to other people no problem.
How much of what you pay for "digital rentals" goes to creators
FWIW, Apple answered this partly recently. At least as it applies to music. It's not very much, but it's supposed to be a lot more than most other services.
I believe the context was refuting accusations in the Spotify dustup. I saw it on a site like macrumors, so some salt may be required.
> FWIW, Apple answered this partly recently. At least as it applies to music. It's not very much, but it's supposed to be a lot more than most other services.
Bandcamp gives artists 85% to 90% of the revenue they collect.
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!
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.
Change it to “rent” or give the option to download. You can’t have a contract where the terms change at any time for any reason (apples account termination policy)
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.
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.
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.
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For most people the term will be "forever", so that is the expectation.
It's simple: if apple want to terminate your account, they need to refund you for any content you lose access to as a result of that termination.
If the good is no longer available except for at 10x or 100x the price, you are owed that. If the good is no longer available at any price, but the person with the liability is capable of making it available, they should be required to do so (or negotiate a contract with you that buys out your rights, but you should be free to decline that or to set whatever price you want).
This is especially relevant in the digital realm where it's an especially effective tactic to undercharge to try and starve competitors, and then raise prices.
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To offer a one time download code seems far more tenable.
I like that idea a lot. I would add that, at the very, very least, they should give you a personal link to download a snapshot of all of your data from their cloud at the time of termination: email, calendar, contacts, photos/videos, docs, et. al.
As a point of interest, in the EU and UK, they probably would be legally required to do something like that for things like mail and calendars, because the GDPR says, roughly speaking, that they have an obligation to keep the data reasonably safe and an obligation to let the data subject have it in some useful format. I doubt those obligations would extend to other creative works you'd purchased, though, since among other things that would drive a coach and horses through international copyright agreements and several reasonable business models built on the resulting legal framework.
In the Netflix case it’s be even more difficult to argue since Netflix doesn’t own the IP and the catalogue is ever shifting. I’m afraid the future is rental at least because the consumer is no longer technically prepared to own and manage their own digital catalogue.
It's very different if (a) you pay per individual item, (b) there's an explicit or implied agreement that you have access to that item indefinitely. Then if your account is terminated, you should be refunded the value of having access indefinitely, which is the original purchase price.
Now maybe you're saying Apple can go to a subscription service where it rents "access" to the library, but those are very different terms.
Point being, IRL stores don't retain any control over anything you buy.
> Price says that Apple terminated his account when the company suspected him of breaching its terms and conditions, but due to the clause in question Apple did not have to confirm a breach occurred or give Price notice or explanation before shutting down his Apple ID. [0]
[0] https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/consumer-pro...
As others have pointed out, refunds aren’t realistic either, and the path can be abused.
A better solution is that you should be able to download your purchases when your account is terminated (or even when it’s active).
An active account should not be required to use your downloaded purchases.
Hypothetically; what if Apple were to cease to exist? Or wanted to discontinue their streaming services? Assuming Apple were in such a position, their financial outlook would probably not be good. They would likely be financially unable to reimburse that many subscribers.
How would winding down such a service work?
In fact, I'd argue that this ought to be the norm -- that content providers be forced to purchase insurance or something precisely in case they go out of business, to ensure customers will have their content migrated to another service, and be refunded for the small proportion of content that isn't available anywhere else.
When a company goes bust, if you are owed money by that company, you put in claims to the estate, and the administrators handle those claims according to a well specified priority list. The customers being reimbursed is part of that process. However, I know that gift cards and store credit tend to be at the bottom of the list, so I wouldn't have high hopes for digital assets being reimbursed either.
Well, not quite that simple, since a lot of people would de facto also lose access to their hardware and all work which relies on this software-hardware-combination.
Beyond that, there are problems there. What’s stopping me from getting all the latest games on iOS, latest movies as they come out then after a few years spend some time purposely breaking TOS so I can get it all refunded.
They could just set a flag on your account to "consume only" or something. Your account would be banned from "interaction" or further purchases, but you wouldn't lose your content.
Remember this sentence to change your mind for the next time you see some movie to buy online.
When contracting with consumers these companies should be forced to be liable and accountable for their algorithmic decisions and arbitrary policy enforcement.
That wouldn't be unreasonable at all. "They clicked the accept EULA button" is not a valid excuse.
Pretending that consumers are able to negotiate a fair contract with Apple is denying reality.
I understand I can lose access, I'm not paying for the content in the idea that I own it forever even if Apple goes under or I get terminated, but I have perpetual access to it given the circumstances don't change, and I pay for the convenience of this.
If I had expected to own it forever, I'd probably have bought DVD's, not digital.
I used to have an account on which I spent at least $400. After an attempt to change the email address associated to the account I got locked out. It seems the same email address was used to create a different account in the past and the move just destroyed my access and any possible recourse.
So I switched to Android and stayed on Android for the last 7 years. No more iPhones for me, just remembering how my content got stolen makes me turn away.
I used to be a big fan of iPhones when they came out, even had a first gen iPhone a couple of months after launch. But after losing access to my content it all turned into the feeling that I am being abused.
If you use iTunes, and "add to library," like I do, you'll see how often albums get removed or replaced or remixed. It's unnecessary and unnerving. The labels are constantly faffing about with albums. Every couple of months, I'll go to play an album, and find that it only has, say, 2 songs in it. Sometimes I can go back and re-add it to my library, sometimes, there's a new "remastered" copy, and sometimes those songs are just no longer available in iTunes. I pay for the subscription, and don't buy music. And I'm glad. I don't know why these changes wouldn't happen to me even if I had paid for it, but maybe that would be exempted? If someone can tell me that this doesn't happen if I buy the album, I would snatch up some of my favorites right away.
Is this iTunes or Apple Music ?
Because it happens all the time on Apple Music which is why I hate streaming services.
Thoughts?
I'm not convinced 'making digital goods disappear' is good. I know WHY it's done and totally understand the justification, but I continue to dislike and distrust the practice.
Should we normalize the idea that everything we own is fungible, at the discretion of a third party, for its exchange value? Under what conditions do they get to swap out our property for replacements or money?
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I stopped seeing any value in purchasing/renting rights to movies and shows from the streaming giants. Want to watch The Office, sorry removed, no longer on Netflix. Oh, you are in a country that has a funny name, content not available in your region. Oh, you are trying to access your Hulu subscription from a Linux device? Max video res capped at 480p. It is such anti-consumer moves that makes me not feel bad for pirating.
IMO, the most maximum returns on home media consumption is gained by acquiring and archiving your own collection of media. I don't have to ask anyone for a license to watch my favorite movie from 1999 when I have the copy on my plex.
Personally I treat my Apple purchases as volatile and approach the budgeting for them similarly as I would budget for events such as movie tickets.
I guess I will soon start a site about the amount of crap and hypocrisy modern Apple are saying. I dont know exactly what happened but post Steve Jobs Apple are getting ridiculous with their defence.
>Remember this sentence to change your mind for the next time you see some movie to buy online.
I read this as "no reasonable consumer would trust us".
That worked in a defamation case, but the First Amendment defense probably won't work in a false advertising case.
[1] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7216968/9-24-20-M...
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Hopefully there will be platform independent store where you can buy once and available on all devices.
With digital you can have backups and in theory they could last forever as you convert the format into whatever is popular.
How do they price this? Do they not do CRCs and hashes and let your bits rot over time and have you buy a new one? How do you approach this commercially? Make music or video very, very faddish so even if it lasts forever no one will want to listen to or watch something out of style ten yeas hence?
I’m not defending Apple. I’m asking how do you price things reasonably if they potentially last forever?
They can potentially last forever, but humans don't. Since Apple's stuff is associated to a personal account, I don't see an issue here, vinyls can also last for a life.
On the other hand, consumers have lost the right to lend, give or sell the stuff they buy. That's not priced either, and we see every possible move be done to make these operations user-hostile, if not forbidden.
Many of the oldest recordings still work, and can be played indefinitely with an optical needle. The time value of money means the possible purchase by a small fraction of buyers 20+ years out isn’t worth much at the time of sale. It’s only moving forward in time that makes anyone care about these sales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable
Of course there's an actual answer to this as well, the economic concept of a discount rate; things far in the future are worth less than they are in the present, by an amount depending on interest minus inflation.
So this line of thought is completely incorrect, digital distribution did not invent the ability to have backups of media you purchased
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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.
As a reaction to decades of cable TV, the market wanted and celebrated Netflix, one place to pay and watch all the shows and movies you want.
But with time, what we got are just multiple cable TV packages served over the internet, each with their own subscription model and poorly developed app.
it just seems like such an absurd idea that everyone would have their own collection of media like this. all of that plastic being generated and then eventually thrown out just so you can have a dvd sit on a shelf where you will use it once every few years, once a decade or maybe once and then never again. i don't know if moral is a word i would use to describe all that
I like the term
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.
I do however believe that Apple will just settle this out of court, specifically to avoid such a ruling.
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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.
But like I said: the cynic in me says neither is going to happen.
Not where I live. You can’t sign away rights given to you by law.
In the US, without legislation we rely on the contracts we sign. When we sign contracts with trillion dollar companies we don’t get to negotiate.
(I think this issue is related to right to repair, which is continuing to gain steam and might be a good effort to join forces with.)
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
How much of what you pay for "digital rentals" goes to creators and towards running the actual infrastructure to download/consume media? This is a questions a lot of companies don't want you to be thinking about.
More generally, it all comes down to the questions brilliantly formulated by Neal Postman:
https://strawdogs.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/neil-postmans-6-q...
And they also kinda accept the mediocre recommendation (often laden with ads and "place in front" for pay content) which just feels like habit after a while.
I'd believe they were actually happy if there was a streaming service that actually didn't have content randomly disappear like it does on Spotify, and if customers still liked Spotify more.
To me, at least, it seems like consumers don't have many choices. They have to compromise with Spotify and others dropping content at the whims of rights holders.
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What is ridiculous is that they pretend the other option - "buying" - which is usually much more costly - is anything close to what people mean by "buying" in a non-digital non-DRM world. If I buy a book, the book is mine. I can read it forever, I can sell it, I can use it as a doorstopper if I like, but whatever I do it's mine. If I "buy" a movie on DRM platform, I can watch is only as long as the platform allows me to, and yet most people do not realize the profound difference. I think it's a good thing there's now a growing awareness that his is false pretense and it's time to shine a light on it.
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.
>This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it.
When I pay for a book in a bookstore, part of the money goes towards maintaining the system that produces and distributes books. The system includes various parties, like printers, publishers, distributors, books stores and so on. It's far more than 10% and there is nothing wrong with paying for a reasonably working distributed system like that.
Replacing all of those companies with a single megacorp like Amazon or Apple is not going to result in the same system running cheaper. It will create an entirely different system. Over time that new system will shift to publish entirely different type of content, it will have an entirely different relationship with consumers and authors and it will have completely different effect on the society at large. Given what I see already, I seriously doubt those changes will skew towards the positive.
It's true the physical book manufacturing is only ~10% of the price.
But you're forgetting costs of shipping, warehousing, stocking, retail, etc. Separate from manufacturing, roughly 40% of what you pay for a book goes to the physical retailer, and that's actually the largest chunk.
When you add up all the costs of producing and transporting and selling the physical book to a customer (and the publisher taking back unsold copies), they make up the majority of a book's cost.
The actual "license of content" cost of a physical book is a minority of the price you pay.
Coincidentally, NFT’s got the “transfer” side of the equation, but forgot about the “privilege” part! The tokens are yours in perpetuity, and can be transferred to others, but it’s not at all clear what privilege they provide.
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…)
Except you're not renting books or optical media. You're buying them, and you can resell them or loan them to other people no problem.
FWIW, Apple answered this partly recently. At least as it applies to music. It's not very much, but it's supposed to be a lot more than most other services.
I believe the context was refuting accusations in the Spotify dustup. I saw it on a site like macrumors, so some salt may be required.
Bandcamp gives artists 85% to 90% of the revenue they collect.
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.
It's very obvious (to those who know how FAANG walled gardens work) that it's a rental and contingent upon them not evaporating your account for some stupid reason. It's entirely non-obvious to the layperson.
Courts clarifying the first sale doctrine here would help a lot.
IMO, one should be able to resell or transfer software or media licenses they've already paid for. Moving online from physical media shouldn't suddenly shaft the consumer and make their media purchases evaporate when they die or lose their email address.
There is a high temptation to abuse the system due to the ease of making a copy. On one hand, it can be attacked with a zero-trust outlook from technical angle (DRM). On the other hand, in a society with higher minimum quality of life and satisfaction eliminating required trust may do more harm than good, as really no one would want to go through the trouble of making illegal copies.
I strongly agree that “selling” something you do not get to own should not even be a valid concept.