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Bruce Willis Considering Legal Action Against Apple Over iTunes Collection
First time accepted submitter oobayly writes "It appears that Bruce 'Die Hard' Willis isn't too impressed that he can't include his iTunes collection in his estate when he dies. According to the article: 'Bruce Willis, the Hollywood actor, is said to be considering legal action against Apple so he can leave his iTunes music collection to his three daughters.' Such a high profile individual complaining about the ability to own your digital music can only be a good thing, right?"
I'm quite sure Steve Jobs would have given everyone as much access to their own content as they wanted, but that it is actually the record labels and/or RIAA demanding these rules.
It's about sending a message.
Good for him.
... we have finally found a socially beneficial use for a cheesy action movie star. Now let's find one for bankers ...
iTunes music is DRM free. He doesn't need to sue to leave it to his daughters.
No, it'll be a write off..
Bullshit. He owns the copies on his 'pod and can transfer it to whoever the hell he wants. What he does not own is the right to create more copies. That is what he needs a license for and that is what copyright is about.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
No DRM, just 5 "installs"? Hmm.. Sounds like DRM to me....
iTunes TV shows and movies, however, are locked up with DRM and can't be transferred.
ITunes music has been DRM free since 2009.
http://www.macworld.com/article/1137946/itunestore.html
So he can't be bothered to just copy his music out of iTunes and do whatever he wants with it?
This sounds more like he wants to leave his iTunes *account* to his estate. It also sounds like he didn't read the iTunes Terms of Service before he agreed to it. Doesn't seem to me Apple is being the "bad guy" here, at least no more than 99.99% of every company out there, as an account you make is for YOU, I've never seen anyone else that allows you to transfer your account to someone else either.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
Pragmatically, Bruce could afford to set a fund aside to re-purchase his library in one of his daughter's names, but I'm sure it's the principle of the thing, and in that respect he's right.
The moral of the story, something I discovered years ago, is that generally it's the terminally lazy and shortsighted who buy their music from itunes. Buy the real CD, import it into itunes, and it's yours forever. You even have a handy backup in the Tupperware bin in the closet. And your kids can get your entire music collection on a DRM-free hard drive that itunes will play, or a collection of cds that they can rip if they feel like it.
I understand, buying directly from itunes is often cheaper than buying a recent commercial CD. (With older music, of course, you can often buy the entire CD for the cost of a couple of tracks, but that's besides the point.) But one of the prices you pay for that discount is that the music is not yours. Oh, it might seem like it's yours, but try to give it away, and you find that it doesn't belong to you.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I refuse to believe even he would want to inflict 'The Return of Bruno' on someone anymore...
It's bizarre at first sight, but it does make sense to treat it differently than real property. Does he intend, for example, that each kid gets a copy? Copyright infringement, he got 3 for the price of 1. It would be "fair" if a single copy could be passed on, and I really hope that will be the law.
I imagine his movies are distributed under the same restrictive license. Is he also trying to loosen up the cpyright restrictions on his creations?
I'm quite sure Steve Jobs would have given everyone as much access to their own content
I think Apple does give people access to their "own content" as much as they want. If you write a song and record it in garage band, you're pretty much free to do whatever you want with it. The problem here is that Willis has purchased songs digitally (probably a lot of them) and now in his mind this is equivalent to him buying vinyl records and compact discs. The problem now is that this license for listening to music was sold to him and the enforcement of this license is quite unfavorable to the consumer -- there is no second sale, there is no inheritance, there is no transferability period.
as they wanted, but that it is actually the record labels and/or RIAA demanding these rules.
You are more than correct but what you fail to understand is that the RIAA did not do business with Willis. The RIAA did business with Apple and Apple did business with Willis. Willis is going after the correct party here because something was sold to him and he had misunderstood the agreement that he signed -- the same one everyone has to "sign" every time the iTunes software is even updated. I've bitched about this so many times on Slashdot but I think that Willis is going to lose when it comes to down to the ToS. Although, I do not remove the blame entirely from Apple because their sales technique and the public understanding of their 'product' is largely misguided if not lying. The public thinks they are purchasing the same thing they did when they bought a CD but now it's digital, it's smaller, compact, more elegant, etc. But that's not true, you're missing a whole bunch of rights that came with buying a CD including the ability to pass a single copy of the CD on to your daughter or liquidate it in the estate sale. At anytime Apple can revoke your right to listen to this CD and I still buy physical copies of music for many reasons -- this being one of them.
I'm the sure the RIAA would have loved to dispatch a gestapo to your estate sale and destroy your vinyl and cassettes when someone died but they didn't. And that meant that these things retained value. Now that they're on the "iCloud" or whatever, they can do that without looking like Nazis so they definitely will and Apple won't have any say in the matter. Don't give Apple a free pass though, they're laughing all the way to the bank as you sign a ToS explaining how your rights are diminutive compared to physical media yet you spend like you're buying a physical entity.
Buy physical media, extract it to your computer and then shelve it. Otherwise you need to understand that what you're "buying" from Apple or Amazon or whomever is non-transferable and at the very least temporary in that you are mortal.
My work here is dung.
Deep voiced Narrator: 'All he wanted, was for his daughters to know his song..'
(cuts to bruce willis in a cab on a california road)
BW:"Snow white aint bitin this apple" (He drives the cab at full speed off a ramp through an apple building, accompanied by obligatory explosions and guitar riffs)
Narrator: "This summer....The fruit will fall from the tree..."
The title Bad Fruit flashes acrosses the screen and the torrentverse goes wild in August.
Sure, there are ways around it, but that is not the point.
If anything, it will make it clear that we don't own anything. That companies own everything we think belongs to us.
I applaud him for making this public.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Not having DRM and being licensed for you to do anything you want with it are entirely separate concepts.
The link is right there in TA:
http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/us/terms.html
However, having quickly scanned through it, I don't immediately see where it states the licenses are non-transferable (it does state that APP licenses are non-transferable, but this is a separate section to the music).
My other UID is three digits.
is non-transferable and at the very least temporary in that you are mortal.
Can a corporation purchase these licenses, and can the corporation be transfered to other relatives?
The DMCA allows non-mortal 'beings' to hold copyright and transfer it indefinately, why should corporeal beings be at a disadvantage when it comes to the same thing.
He 'spent thousands of dollars on digital music'? Great, now he can spent hundreds of hours converting them to mp3s.
Typical slashdotter with the attention span of a gnat. Any music purchased on iTunes can be copied easily (you can completely legally remove all DRM that may have been on some music years ago by upgrading for something like $0.30 per song, or by using iTunes Match). The problem is to transfer _legal ownership_ of the music he purchased to his heirs.
Apart from that, it doesn't take even a minute to tell my Mac to convert all my about 18,000 or so songs in AAC format to MP3. The Mac will admittedly take a while to do so, but who cares?
No, it's iTunes. When I buy music through means other than iTunes (CDs), some of those labels are RIAA members too, but they have done nothing to prevent me from transferring the CDs. Thus, it's an iTunes problem, not a publisher problem.
It sounds like the mistake Willis made, is that he's licensing music instead of buying it. I have never licensed any music and never will. I'll switch to piracy if they ever stop selling. The good news is that even as late as 2012, music is still for sale. They aren't telling paying customers to fuck off, yet.
But they do offer the "fuck yourself" option to foolish customers, and it looks like Willis took the bait. Avoid iTunes and similar services, buy music like you always have, and you'll avoid this problem.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
The only reason Bruce Willis and not Chuck Norris is sueing is that Chuck Norris CAN keep his iTunes collection in the family heirloom.....
bickerdyke
Maybe he meant it like this:
try:
sue(Apple)
except:
masses(Bruce is not almighty)
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
I wondered what he is trying to accomplish, end of the day if he left his collection to someone: Is he wanting to be able to transfer the collection from his account to his kids account? Does apple allow that ?
If someone used the export or whatever to get it out of iTunes as DRM free files, can those be added to someone else's collection? what's the difference between an "official" iTunes file and an mp3 or such?
Just curious, I've stayed away from iTunes for the most part myself....
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
because corporeal beings don't run the government.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Pirate Bay it is then. You can re-download as many times as you need to and you can pass it on without a problem.
The message is "Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker"
Content producers have almost always fought this war, and they have fought it in a way that makes their customer the enemy. They fought tooth and nail against fair use (and still do, the fair usage battles rage on across the globe, and there are no defined standards in the area, with each country going through the legal battles at various miserable stages.)
Apple is not alone. Depending on where you live, You may or may not be allowed to backup the content you 'lease'. I say lease because if you are not allowed to backup content, or rather, if you are not allowed to do what you wish with something you paid for, its not ownership - its more a lease or rental. If you live in the UK, you are not even legally allowed to buy CD's from Hong Kong - because its deemed that although you may have suffered from globalism, you are not allowed to benefit from it. Not so far as the media and content producer mafia is concerned.
Again, depending on where you live, and on how successful these mafia have been in their defense of their ownership - You may not be allowed to copy the CD or DVD or Blue Ray of music or film, or computer game- that you paid for. In such cases, I know of some computer game vendors who do in fact offer to replace the 'defective' disk - and I suppose this is a limited offer. I don't suppose they will still offer that in 20 years time, at least for old games. Music and Film I am less aware of. Do they offer a lifetime replacement offering - or do they sell the goods knowing CD/ DVD will be a fading medium in due course. Buy a new copy might be their way out of the hole. Convenient for them, expensive for you. Compared to this, Apple's digital offering might have legs. Until you die, and then your lease is over.
So, I'll cut to the chase. Bruce (and anyone else in the same boat) should digitise what they have paid for and forceably take their ownership of the item and end the problem. When you die, your digital collection goes to whoever you wish. Yes, this collection won't be cloud based and won't reside in the Apple garden, and you'll have to take responsibility for its maintainance - just as anything in life.
*Please note. I'm not advocating piracy. I'm advocating you bequeth the one paid for copy to one person. Or similar. This may not be in line with Apple terms, or even legal terms in your territory. But if the terms or legalities are so stupid, then they deserve to be broken in any case.
*Legal note* - Most UK MPs MP3 their music. These people are responsible for the law still stating in the UK that this is illegal.
*Second legal note* - Nobody I am aware of in the UK has been arrested for converting one or multiple tracks they own into MP3 and illegally loading it onto an MP3 player.
*3rd legal note* No record company has ever tried to enforce this in legal case, and they would be epically stupid to ever try.
We`re all equal
Apple is doing it wrong. On their homepage, at http://www.apple.com/itunes/ there's a link "Buy Music Now." It doesn't say "buy a personal license" or "license music", It says "buy"
I've bitched about this so many times on Slashdot but I think that Willis is going to lose when it comes to down to the ToS.
Is it legal for the ToS to say that you can't have these rights? In the US the answer is probably yes. In the EU the answer may well be no. The issue of whether digital media is property in the traditional sense seems to still be in the air pretty much everywhere in the world, with much of it taking its lead from the USA. There are whole industries in the US based on it not being equivalent so that they can continue to sell the same users new licenses for the same content in different contexts, so it seems like Willis has a steep uphill battle no matter what happens. On the other hand, everyone in the US and in many other countries have a stake in how this comes out, and Willis has broad international recognition, so it may well be worth the effort to keep this story afloat.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I agree, but only because non-physical media is not yet for sale, or only rarely.
So buying a license isn't a non-physical media? The electrons that deliver the purchase aren't physical media. I think you are trying so hard to make a point you didn't actually state that you ended up making incorrect statements trying to support your silly premise/conclusion.
If they don't sell songs, but instead sell licenses, I should still be able to sell/transfer the non-transferable licenses. Why? Because a contract may not violate law. And the law allows me to resell my items without getting Ford's permission, and the person who buys it may still drive it without re-licensing it from Ford. The problem isn't that it's a license. It's that it's digital. The digital confuses the judges and law makers. That's why one-click stood up for 10 years. "Put it on my tab" added "on a computer" at the end, and suddenly was novel and non-obvious? Most computer patents are for something that has been used for 1000 years or longer, but with "on a computer" at the end, making it confusing to the patent office, just like telling someone they didn't buy a song when they gave money and got a song in return is ok when it's on a computer, though for the past 100 years, you "owned" the song you bought.
Learn to love Alaska
Your post is completely spot on. You simply need to sum it up by saying something like, licensing != buying .
and that's what the beef is.
Apple calls it consistently PURCHASING! NOT LIFETIME RENTING or some bullshit like that. it's a consumer rights thing to call things what they are..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You do realize that Apple selling DRM free music was a business decision because Amazon was selling DRM free music and had cut into iTunes' sales, right?
Apple had asked the industry to sell DRM free music before Amazon started offering it.
The labels allowed Amazon to sell DRM free first, hoping to break the market dominance that Apple had.
When that failed, they gave up and allowed Apple to sell DRM free music like they wanted to do all along.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not sure about the Telegraph's sources, but the entire story is fake: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57505248-501465/bruce-willis-is-not-suing-apple-over-itunes-inheritance-wife-tweets/ some great flamebait though....
The license says that your music is "non-transferable". Amazon is the same, and so are all the other big names. Although you can copy-paste the files to wherever and whoever you wish, you will be doing so "illegally"; you can give the files to your daughter, but if the RIAA ever get a peek at her hard-drive she'll be hauled in front of a court for copyright "piracy".
I'd call that "DRM". Not technical DRM, but legal DRM.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/03/bruce-willis-itunes-music-library/
"Update: Like many of our peers, we also fell for this good old British tabloid rumor at first. We have updated the story now that Willis’ wife has denied that this story was true."
Slashdot may want to retract, or update the story.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
Actually, there's a pretty arcane way to get around this restriction if the files are on your Mac. An esoteric program invoked from the command line called "cp".
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
and that's what the beef is.
Apple calls it consistently PURCHASING! NOT LIFETIME RENTING or some bullshit like that. it's a consumer rights thing to call things what they are..
Which is interesting, as in my country we have very precise laws which define what a "Purchase" is, as opposed to a lease or limited licence. Even using "Buy" on the buy-button in a netshop (which everyone does) would probably invalidate any subsequent licence requirements, as "Buy" has a very clearly defined legal meaning here. User "Kjella" could probably expound :)
Consumers not only perceive that they are buying the digital content permanently, they might be backed by law as long as the transaction is called a "purchase" by the vendor. Sadly no-one has yet gone to court over this, as the real action as perceived by purveyors is licencing, and this is obviously deceptive to consumers.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!