Apple Can Delete Purchased Movies From Your Library Without Telling You (theoutline.com)

Casey Johnston, writing for The Outline: When you buy a movie on iTunes, it's yours forever, until such a time as when Apple maybe loses the rights to distribute it, and then it will disappear from your library without a trace. This is what happened to Anders G. da Silva, who goes by @drandersgs on Twitter, and who tweeted about losing three movies bought on the iTunes Store.

When da Silva wrote to Apple to complain about the missing movies, Apple wrote back to him that "the content provider has removed these movies from the Canadian Store. Hence, these movies are not available in the Canada iTunes Store at this time." For his trouble in notifying Apple that it had disappeared three of his ostensible belongings for incredibly dubious legal reasons, Apple offered da Silva not even a refund, but two credits for renting a movie on the iTunes Store "priced up to $5.99 USD." After he argued that he was not in the market for rentals and would just like the movies he purchased, please, Apple tried to appease him with two more rental credits.

Comments

Never Buy Apple

[rea1l1]

Never buy Apple unless you are okay with being a slave to their dictatorial policies. Please support Linux.

Re:Never Buy Apple

[Anubis IV]

I completely agree, but I also think this summary is being a bit unfair. Apple didn't reach into his hard drive to delete his local copies. They simply pulled the listing from their store, meaning that new downloads and streaming are no longer possible.

It's the same practice they've had across all their services for years. When a developer pulls an app from the app store, the app's users get to keep their local copies, can transfer them to new devices, and can otherwise use them without issue. Same thing for films. My wife had a dozen films she had purchased in iTunes before we got married, and they all still work fine (though these days I have her buying DRM-free so that we can get them into Plex more easily). I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Apple lost the rights to distribute some of her films, but we'd likely never know.

Re:Never Buy Apple

[AmiMoJo]

Google Play is the only major service selling DRM free audiobooks. Audible/Amazon has DRM, iTunes has DRM.

Re: Never Buy Apple

[c6gunner]

Say I sell you a digital download of a program I wrote. You pay me $15 and in return I provide a personalized download link. You download a copy of the software. A month later I disable the link.

What part of our agreement did I violate?

Because that's exactly what's going on here. You might argue that apple has implied that the link will always be available but, as far as I can tell, that stipulation was never part of any contract. They generally keep the "link" available in order to make their service more useful to you, but there's nothing that says they HAVE to do that. They've given you the ability to download it and you presumably have. They don't have to keep letting you download it in the future.

Re: Never Buy Apple

[saloomy]

This is kind of a half-true story though. The movies are yours when you buy them from Apple, and you can download them and have them forever. They will not delete from your devices. What Apple also gives you is the ability to redownload them onto other devices and at a later time, but it has to retain the right to do so. When the movie companies change their contracts on Apple, this is what happens.

I doubt Apple wanted to lose the rights to redistribute purchased content for reasons exactly like this story, they get painted as the bad guy. This was just poor negotiations for perpetual purchases and the guy lost out since he didn't maintain his purchased copy.

What I do fault Apple for is not notifying the gentleman that his movie would be gone from online distribution a week prior to its removal so he could facilitate getting a copy offline for himself. That's what sucks about this, and is a place I think Apple could improve its process pretty easily with a simple push notification

You didn't purchase movies

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't purchase movies. You entered into an agreement which allows you access to content as long as Apple feels like providing it. LOL. Silly users, thinking you "owned" movies.

It's Not About Buying vs Leasing

[Blue Stone]

In this case, however, she bought the movies and then deleted them from her system. She was relying on Apple's service to be able to re-download them again.

These are two seperate things.

If she had kept her local copies, Apple would not have removed these items from her computer; they were, however, unable to re-supply her with copies of the movies she'd bought via their service because thye'd lost the licensing rights to distribute said movies.

Imagine a store that you buy a DVD from that also allows you to stream a copy of the same DVD from their servers. If you lose the DVD, or destroy it, you can stream the movie until they lose licensing rights. If you don't lose or destroy the DVD, you don't have to rely on this third party.

The person in the story 'destroyed their DVD' and then their streaming provider lost their distribution rights.

She relied on a third party backup. She thought this was a guaranteed service. She was wrong.

None of this, however, has anything to do with buying vs leasing/licensing/renting and companies telling you you bought something when you merely licensed or rented it (although this remains an issue in digital consumer law in any number of countries). If she'd kept her downloaded copy, she'd still have it.

Re:Why buy?

[jwhyche]

Spoken like someone that doesn't have kids. How many times I've heard that damn crab crone "kiss the girl.?" Thank god I drew the line at a teletubby disk collection.