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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.
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.
My kids have on occasion wanted to buy movies from Comcast and I have resisted specifically because I don't want to have to do business with a specific utility in order to maintain access to purchased content. Instead, I have allowed that content to be purchased from the equivalent of merchants like Apple and Amazon. This story sets a dangerous path that suggests physical media may still be the only way to go. It also gives a certain amount of moral license back to torrent downloads.
Never "buy" content from any of these online streaming services. It's all rented and always has been. And not just Apple.
This is the "victim's" fault for not understanding what he was doing, this was obvious from day one. But people argue how much better and easier it is than old fashioned discs. And they will continue to "buy" into these pay per view streaming services.
...movies are always free on The Pirate Bay.
This is why we don't buy anything as a download. Physical media only. I'll take the time to rip it myself. If you want to own it, you have to have something physical to maintain control of it.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
This is why we need stronger consumer protection. This isn't a weird, difficult, complex issue. In my mind, there's a very simple solution to this:
Make it illegal for digital media stores to remove access to anything that has been purchased. If, for some reason, they're unable to continue hosting it for streaming, they should be legally required to provide you with a DRM-free download.
Or else, they should be barred from using words like "buy" or "purchase". They can offer "long term rentals" with clear and explicit wording that access may be revoked at any time. Those disclaimers should not be buried in a EULA or terms of service. It should be legally required to be displayed obviously each time the long-term rental is offered.
You could debate some of the details, but the basic gist should be clear: Either provide people with what they "bought", or make it clear that they're not buying it.
I don’t mind pay per view or all-you-can-eat services like Spotify, because you are getting exactly what you are paying for: one view (or multiple views in a very short timeframe) of a particular movie, or access to whatever is on offer with the streaming service. If you don’t like their collection anymore, cancel your subscription at the end of the month.
If however you aim to build a library, physical discs or download-to-own content unencumbered by DRM are the only way to go. Everything else is just paying full price for rentals.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
This is the "victim's" fault for not understanding what he was doing, this was obvious from day one.
Not at all. This is unequivocally Apple's fault for describing it as a "purchase" instead of as a "rental". If Apple didn't secure a license to the content for effectively "forever" (such as a 99-year license) before "selling" the content to the user, then they made the sale in poor faith. Their activity was in fact fraud.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Good reason to go back to bitTorrent. Buying should mean you own it.
Their store calls it "buy" and the price is set at a level far above the rent price: everything suggests you can buy movies. Don't blame the victim for not reading the fine print on what seems like a very ordinary consumer purchase.
I was buying Mac's for my daily driver laptops because of the high quality hardware. Well, I had been since 2003. Sadly, while I still have a PowerBook (PPC based) that works fine and one 2011 that sorts works okay my latest laptops have all died.
The last MacBook Pro I had was especially troubling. See, I'm a hardware engineer so I figured I could fix it. Nope. What died? A proprietary power management IC that also does some copy protection crap for Apple. I can't buy it or even get a data sheet on it.
My answer was to buy a ThinkPad and put Linux on it. It's faster and works better. Maybe I'll even try to run Altium in Wine rather than in a VM -- which may be nicer than it was on my MBP.
So yeah, the only endearing quality (well built HW) for crApple products is now gone I see no reason to buy anything from them. They want to be a phone company but their phone offering (iOS) is abysmal.
I expect that if you read the terms of service (you do read that, before you click "OK"buying anything, you are renting it, anybody who doesn't understand that needs a keeper.
Most people can't understand the ToS. They are deliberately written to be difficult to understand, and contain unnecessary verbiage to discourage people from digging into them to begin with. That's part of why we have laws governing contracts. Further, pretending that the meanings of words doesn't matter is bollocks. Apple deliberately confused customers, and the ToS doesn't change that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You mean the TOS that they can change whenever they want? That TOS? Also, is everyone a lawyer, now? Because if not, maybe go fuck yourself with your TOS bullllshit.
It doesn't matter what the terms say what apples language clearly says purchase, not rent.
It's deceptive marketing.
I've purchased plenty of DVDs and Blu-ray discs from Amazon. I've yet to have an Amazon employee show up at my door to reclaim them.
If thats what happened, its still a joke. People rely on the cloud to back up their stuff. Anything can happen to local storage, and the apple ecosystem is so tied to the internet.
Can you even pull an mp4 file out of itunes with this movie to properly back it up? I would guess no.
Its hard to make an analogy, as there is no real life equivalent to repositories of software. But one assumes that purchases are for life and that if they have some licensing problem, they should prevent new downloads but honour downloads for things people have paid for.
Perhaps its like leasing a car, that then gets into an accident, and you go back to the dealer to get a lease replacement only to be told there are no other cars available, but you still have to continue making lease payments for a car you no longer have access to.
Oh well, not my problem personally. As everyone else moves to streaming I maintain my local library which is triple backed up.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
The words "purchase" and "contract" are not synonyms, though.
If you don't own the content, you did not purchase the content. If you did purchase it, then you do own it. And if somebody takes it away and says otherwise, perhaps they actually stole it? That can be true even if they claim to have authorized themselves.
That's why some countries have legislation against that sort of semi-hidden clauses. Germany for instance.
Besides, if the word "Sale" is displayed prominently and Apple's option to "retract" the content is only somewhere in the small print, the two directly contradict each other. So in court, the judge would have to decide which takes precedence. Common sense might say the "sale" that was written in big letters in the ad.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Actually not true.
Actually, it is. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
While it's true that the kill switch exists, it isn't what happens when Apple loses the license to content or a developer pulls their app under normal conditions, nor is it related in any way to what happened here or what we're talking about. The only times I'm aware of the kill switch being used are for malware apps, and even then, Apple has only ever used it sparingly.
Just to highlight how loathe Apple is to use the kill switch, I once purchased an app that—if the user entered a particular sequence of buttons—turned the phone into a WiFi hotspot without the need for any jailbreaking. This was back in the time when carriers didn't allow iPhones to be used that way. Apple yanked the app from the store within a few hours of the sequence going viral, but you know what they didn't do? Delete it from my devices or prevent me from using it in any way. I used that app for years, and then it went with me to the next phone, and the one after that, until it finally stopped working years and years later after an OS update dropped compatibility for apps that hadn't been updated.
So yes, while they can kill apps (to which I never suggested otherwise), they didn't do that here, so let's stay on topic.
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.
Then they should pull it from the store but leave it available for download for those who've purchased it. Da Silva purchased a license for these three songs from Apple, and Apple payed the licensor their share of the sale. It shouldn't matter if Apple looses their license to distribute the product, da Silva already purchased it and Apple is now a cloud storage location for that particular file. Either that, or the license holder needs to provide a means for legally purchased media to be downloaded by those who, in good faith, purchased it.
--- Keep the choice with the user..