Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?
Then go right ahead and hit the “buy” button to pick up a movie on iTunes. Then, be ready to kiss that movie goodbye if Apple loses the rights to distribute it.
Yes, it turns out Apple’s iTunes shop is more of a “store front” than a “store,” as it explained to Anders G. da Silva recently. After Apple whisked away three of his purchased movies, the aggravated, de-movified man tweeted about the exchange this week, noting that Apple offered him two free rentals to make up for it.
Hmph! he said. That’s kind of like walking into a store, buying a “stereo,”, bringing the supposedly stereo-holding box home, opening it up to find a bunch of rocks, bringing it back to the store, and being told that hey, sorry, we can’t help, da Silva said. We’re just a storefront. But how about this: you can rent a stereo from us!
https://twitter.com/drandersgs/status/1039270646243414016
Apple explained to da Silva that the problem is that he’s in Canada. For whatever reason, the content provider decided to pull the movies out of the Canadian iTunes store:
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.
The legally helpless trillion-dollar company didn’t even offer da Silva a refund. Instead, he got two credits for renting movies on iTunes – priced up to $5.99 USD, that is.
He wasn’t in the market for rentals, da Silva responded, and would just like the movies he purchased, please.
We totally get it, Apple said, and proceeded to prove it totally didn’t get it by trying to appease him with two more rental credits.
This is a clear-cut lesson of the importance of reading that which is never read: the Ts and Cs!
After all, the iTunes Store’s Terms of Service do address this kind of incident:
You may be able to redownload previously acquired Content (“Redownload”) to your devices that are signed in with the same Apple ID (“Associated Devices”). You can see Content types available for Redownload in your Home Country at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204632. Content may not be available for Redownload if that Content is no longer offered on our Services.
This isn’t the first time that content “store fronts” have pulled a disappearing act with what people thought was “their” content. In 2009, Amazon did it with George Orwell books – “Animal Farm” and “1984” – reaching out to erase the books from customers’ Kindles.
No, you don’t own your Kindle books, Amazon reminded another customer in 2012. It shuttered the account of a Norwegian woman, who lost 43 purchased books, after determining that her account was “directly related to another which has been previously closed for abuse of our policies.” Which policies? What other account? Amazon wouldn’t say. Though it did send this glob of legalese:
Per our Conditions of Use which state in part: Amazon.co.uk and its affiliates reserve the right to refuse service, terminate accounts, remove or edit content, or cancel orders at their sole discretion.
Please know that any attempt to open a new account will meet with the same action.
In short, as da Silva came to find out, we never really “buy” digital content. It’s at best a rental, given the legal control that content sellers keep to themselves and the ease of getting at – and deleting – cloud-stored data. You’re better off buying a DVD, he noted: at least it’s a physical thing that Apple can’t get at unless it sends armed iMilitia.
But remember, this is a two-way street. Apple can not only make things disappear without your say-so; it can also make things appear without your say-so! …like it did with U2’s album back in 2014.
The compulsory download of Songs of Innocence was yet another reminder that our iTunes libraries, just like Kindle libraries, aren’t walled gardens solely for our enjoyment, unchanging for perpetuity. They’re more like sponges that can get squeezed to suck up or discharge what the store fronts want to – or are legally compelled to – have in there.
So, remember, next time you want to spend your hard-earned money on content, and you’re hovering over that “buy” button, just do your own mental translation: swap “buy” for “rent,” and see how valuable “your” content feels after that.
Mark Stockley
It’s all a matter of perspective, I think.
Some of the most valuable lessons I received at art college weren’t about art, but about running your own illustration business. Part of that covered information about how copyright works. Typically, when you purchase artwork, like the photo adorning this article, you don’t actually purchase the item, you purchase a license to use the item in a particular context.
This can protects content creators, who price their works according to how they will be used, from some forms of exploitation.
As a result of those lessons, and of having skin in the game as an illustrator trying not to get ripped off, when I see things like this I am not surprised. Da Silva purchased the rights to use the movie in a particular context. Unfortunately he didn’t realise that he was doing this, which is not a surprise, and not his fault either, but neither is it at all unusual.
What’s missing is consumer education, so that people are protected from their own misunderstanding, and, as you say, a clear indication of what “buy” actually means.
Anonymous
“Unfortunately he didn’t realise that he was doing this, which is not a surprise, and not his fault either.” Have you looked at the Apple Ts and Cs link? Its really not that hard to understand. Right near the top – “It is your responsibility not to lose, destroy, or damage Content once downloaded. We encourage you to back up your Content regularly.” No s**t Sherlock.
Seems that Naked Security loves picking on Apple for being “legally helpless the trillion dollar company” – not sure why the wealth of the company matters. The copyright holder of the movie legally stopped Apple from making it available in Canada. Surely Da Silva should be complaining to the copyright holder who let him buy a movie and then changed their minds about wanting Canadians to watch it.
Bryan
For eons I enjoyed mocking Apple’s official motto
“It Just Works”
for pretending they were the only tech that can’t have failures.
(Their unofficial motto is eternally the far-more abhorrent
“We Will Tell You What You Like“)
However, in this context they completely subvert their unilateral dominance by capitulating to copyright/licensing concerns from the artist–note I’m not saying it’s bad, . As an artist I appreciate that viewpoint, but as a geek and consumer I recognize the blatant hypocrisy it brings.
Apple They could frame this as the artist being the bad guy. And maybe the artist is being belligerent–maybe they dropped Canadian distribution in the current political climate for no justifiable reason. Maybe the owner of the copyright just sold an exclusive distribution deal to a different company (and is thrilled it’s not a dominant company like Apple). We don’t know.
I read Lisa’s point as “Apple the behemoth (come on, don’t deny it) could steamroll this if they chose to do so.” It’d cost them some skin, but they could.
Of course then they’d be trampling a different little guy for different reasons–and slightly less scrupulous ones.
Paul Ducklin
Why would Apple “steamroll” anyone in a case like this that is actually pretty trivial? Bloke bought a movie. Presamably, bloke watched the movie. Bloke lost the movie. Apple no longer has a copy of it in stock to provide him with a replacement – even if he were willing to pay for it all over again, he couldn’t get a new copy. How sad, too bad. I’m trying really, really hard not to use the rather unlikable phrase “First World Problem” to describe this guy’s tantrum, but I’m struggling to hold it back…
chrissfoot
As I understand this case: Apple didn’t actually remove these from his library. He did not have local copied of them. What Apple changed was that he could no longer re-download them since Apple were no longer allowed to redistribute the movies. If he had kept his copies, he’d still have them. Kind of like buying your stereo from the shop but deciding you don’t have enough room at home for it so you keep it at the shop to use occasionally but the shop goes bust so you can no longer use your stereo.
Mark Stockley
Presumably he felt he didn’t need local copies and was content to keep them in the cloud under the impression that his cloud storage was also his possession, rather than the “somebody else’s computer” that it really is.
D-tothe-J
It’s kinda like your description, but not really like it at all. Companies like Apple tout the simplicity of using their services to store your content, and they’re trillion dollar companies we trust and don’t foresee “Going Out Of Business!” fire sales anytime soon.
It’s one of those things that will only impact a small number of people. So, the simple solution for a profitable company like Apple is to apologize for their inability to maintain long term agreements for the content they sell, and refund the customer. Maybe set a max refund of $10 with 2 rental coupons.
It’s simple for me. I will never buy another movie from Apple. They do their best to force you to maintain the content in iTunes. Then, it may disappear from my Apple account? No, thank you. I’ll find a different service and store the full content in a cheap (so not iCloud) Cloud Storage account of my own.
Anonymous
1st he bought his content…buying indicates an ownership…it is a bit disingenuous to list something as “buying” instead of “renting/ leasing” or at least showing a warning message at the time of purchase that content is only available as long as the content provider is willing to provide it.
2nd if we all have to turn into attorneys to “buy” something then we are all in trouble. The only true test of legal rights is to have it adjudicated in a court of law, which costs money, time, and likely many headaches. Just because someone says something doesn’t make it right or legal.
Paul Ducklin
Well, you “buy” insurance cover. You “buy” get and put options. Heck, you can even “buy” debt. The word “buy” is the word we’ve used in the article headline – perhaps it isn’t quite the right one in legalistic or contractual terms, but IMO it’s generic and clear enough.
The legal specifics in what is happening in the transaction that we’ve glibly called “buying a movie” is set out in Apple’s T&Cs. The link is in the article. You’re supposed to download the file, and at that point you have to look after it for yourself – just as if you bought a sofa and took it home. Apple *can’t* then delete it any time (I wouldn’t have used those words in the headline, TBH, just in case people inferred that it meant Apple could reach out and remove it from your hard disk at will), and indeed Apple urges you to back up your purchases so you can’t delete them by mistake, either.
If you lose the file you’ve already downloaded, Apple will let you download it again for free, provided that it’s still available for purchase at that point. Otherwise, as the T&Cs say, not entirely unreasonably, you’re on your own.
I’m not trying to be an apologist for Apple here, but I think it’s equally fair to say that Da Silva’s “right” to download the file again could equally well be considered a favour that Apple would have offered him if legally it still could. But it couldn’t so it offered him some freebie rentals instead.
Riggerrob
I don’t know much about this, but just from reading this article and others and the comments, it would appear that the cloud is used for a large amount of space, ie movies. You’d would have to have maybe a terabyte (?) of hard drive to download large amounts of movies, (I don’t know how many he had), therefore putting them in the cloud. I truly don’t understand any of the EULAs that I read, and believe me, I try to read them all. Slippery slope as I say!
Paul Ducklin
I found the Apple T&Cs much shorter and more comprehensible than I expected. TBH I was quite surprised.
D-tothe-J
I look forward to the class action lawsuit requiring Apple, and others, to change the button from ‘Buy’ to something else.
Mark Stockley
The thing is, you are buying something, it just isn’t what you think it is.
Mahhn
yes and errrr,,, They should say; “You are purchasing a revocable license to use service/software/data”.
The only thing you really own (that can’t be taken from you) is your soul, unless you make a really bad deal.
Paul Ducklin
Actually, the bit that was revoked in this case was Apple’s right to let you re-download it. If the complainer in this case had had already downloaded the file he would not have lost his right to keep watching it.
The idea that Apple unilaterally “deleted his content” or “revoked his right to watch what he’d bought” is not what happened here… any more than the kitchenware store “revokes your right to make tea” when you drop and smash the teapot you bought last year that is no longer in stock.
Warren (@phlll)
Maybe if the distribution rights change the user should be able to choose from either a copy of the physical media (at the expense of the owner of the IP) or a full refund from where they “purchased” it.
D-tothe-J
Maybe a requirement to warn the “purchaser” and give them 30 days to download the movie before it goes all Houdini without warning. That’s probably the cheapest/easiest answer. If you’re an artist who sells out to the man by distributing your art through a trillion dollar corporation, it shouldn’t be too much to ask to let the man warn their/your customers that they need to download their copy of your art so they don’t lose it, get mad, and lose the relationship they had with the man and the artist. I could go for that.
Paul Ducklin
That’s pretty much exactly what Apple *does* tell the purchaser. Check the T&Cs. They’re much more clear and digestible than I imagined they’d be, and the details around your ability to re-download lost content so obvious, that my sympathy in this case switched to Apple, trillion dollar company or not.
If it were 10 years ago and this guy bought a DVD, lent it to a buddy and the buddy lost it, you wouldn’t expect the video store to give him his money back – this seems like a surprisingly similar sort of situation.
Max
But they don’t give a heads up before they no longer offer the content. A simple “Hey, we see you have purchased these 3 videos from our library, the content provider of those 3 movies will no longer offer them in your region starting two weeks from now. If you do not have local copies of the movies anymore, make sure to redownload them again before that time.” wouldn’t be hard to implement. Sure their ToS may state that you can lose the ability to redownload at any time, but since they offer the redownload feature at all they might as well make it usable. Because if anything can dissappear without any notice whatsoever at any time I wouldn’t take the gamble of relying on it at all. So a little heads up when content is about to dissappear would go a long way.
Paul Ducklin
I hear you. Giving an early warning would be nice…
…but Microsoft gave people seven years of warning about the end of XP, and look how that ended :-)
I suspect that the withdrawal of download rights by the copyright holders is sometimes a lot less clear cut than “in two weeks’ time this goes away”, and that for Apple to give a reliable and consistent form of early warning might be something of a fool’s errand. But, yes, if Apple could do what you suggest that would be handy. Of course, it still wouldn’t be a case of “Apple can delete your files any time”, which is not I how I would have described this a-little-bit-of-a-storm-in-a-teacup-if-we’re-all-honest story, but that is an issue for another day.
DW
That’s a pretty workable solution. I mean, they should be more up front with what you’re really getting, but with that, if they admit they’re more of a Netflix than and actual shop, this could work. I noticed recently that Netflix does have certain offerings posted with an expiration date so I’ll be watching that more carefully from now on.
J.D. Kraemer
The level of complication that suggests is outrageous. What if this customer has a British billing address associated with his Apple account? What if the customer was temporarily in Canada?
How do you caution all users who have purchased a product that may or may not be affected by content delivery restrictions in regions they may or may not visit without it being seen as a nuisance to the consumer? Would you want a warning email in your inbox? Probably wouldn’t get read. A warning pop-up in iTunes? Might not get read either. And at worst then it becomes a PR issue for the company trying to warn their customers of a service outage being perceived as fear-mongering at worse, or invasive at best since it’s using personal information (even something as simple as purchase history for a specific product) to warn potentially affected customers.
Bryan
Since 2000, I’ve appended plastic Linux fish onto three vehicles. Last year after Grandpa died I bought his car, and I’m very bummed at the current fishy dearth leaving his unadorned. The fact that I really want one doesn’t mean TG owes me a refund for those I already bought; I professed my geekitude to thousands of tailgaters and got my $5 worth.
Anonymous
This is the reason people should just stop worrying about giving the big movie guys money and just pirate everything, I’m sick of these huge company’s doing this kind of shit to us. If they wont refund you just pirate it.
Paul Ducklin
Yeah, because backing up your own data is, like, so hard.
Bryan
I strongly dislike Apple and will not defend them. As Mark and Duck advise, backups immediately after purchase will protect you from this–and they reigned in my initial ire as well.
As a musician who recently released an album, I’ll remind you that piracy will only hurt those who created the content. *Far* more than Apple–who won’t even notice, let alone care.
AFAIK we will not revoke distribution rights anywhere for any reason, but Apple won’t care if we do or not. I’m not a huge company, and my one-seventh of your six bucks makes a lot bigger difference to me.
Steve
Yeah, because two wrongs make a right. Right?
Stephen M
I have two binders of 256 DVDs each (plus some loose ones) that I bought since DVDs came out. I used to pulled them out as needed. Then, I got smart, I setup a plex server with 40TB RAW storage (25TB usable ZRAID-3). I have downloaded every movie I could find, then I ripped the remainder and stored them on the server. I get the convenience of the cloud and don’t have to worry about losing access.
Even if you have a copy of a deleted movie, you can no longer stream it, which greatly reduces the functionality promised by Apple. Customers who already purchased it should have been given warning so they could download them and/or been grandfathered in. Apple didn’t care if their iSheep got ripped off, so they didn’t negotiate eternal rights.
The music industry tried this crap and lost. Eventually, Steve Jobs told them to drop DRM from iTunes and people are willing to buy their music. Back in the dark days of DRM, you could only burn a song a certain number of times (I think 5). So, if I wanted to include American Idiot on 5 mixed CDs and have a CD with the whole album, I was SOL. That’s when I stopped buying DRM content unless I could break the DRM.
Anonymous
I worked in the film industry and this caught my attention. Please don’t pirate movies. We work really, really, REALLY hard to make movies and television. It’s costly and time consumptive. It takes 12-14 hour days shooting on location in the rain, and in the desert, and in freezing nights in cities. It looks super glamorous and everything, but I guarantee you it is hard work.
Every time you pirate something you’re stealing from both the people who work on the film as well as other customers. This results in distributors driving up pricing just to compensate for the people stealing, so customers have to pay more and the people working to make those films get paid less.
Mike
I agree with others on here. The term “buy” and “purchase” means to take ownership of an item. Now if the button said “lease/rent” on it I would know that I get the item for a specified amount of time in regards to renting/leasing. But when I buy/purchase something I get those rights.
Just like when you buy a DVD/Bluray, you purchase the rights to watch that video in your personal home. You do not own the movie, you own some rights to watch the movie. It should be the same as purchasing the digital rights. So if I do not own the digital rights and Apple does, then I actually do not own those rights at all and therefor did not buy/purchase the item.
I purchase my movies from Amazon where there is clearly a buy and rent button. I choose to digitally purchase those movies because honestly, dvd’s take up lots of space and when I do not use them it is just more stuff to throw away.
I think Apple and other content streaming services need to change the buttons if this is the real case. Change the button to lease from buy/purchase. But I bet it would open a lot of user’s eyes to what they are really getting.
Paul Ducklin
It is a purchase, in any reasonable use of the word. (If you acquire a property under a leasehold, not freehold, you still talk about “buying a house”.)
If you wanted to buy the digital rights even to a modestly popular movie you’d probably be spending tens of millions, not tens, of dollars.
Seriously, are you under the impression that when you “buy instead of rent” a movie from Amazon that you actually own the rights to the movie itself? Or that when you download purchased software – even free software! – that it becomes yours in every sense of the word?
Anon
No one remains under the impression that they’re purchasing the rights to the movie.
They are however quite justified in being impressed that they are purchasing a copy of the movie.
If Apple does not intend to sell a copy of the movie, they must make it clear that they are merely leasing it at their discretion.
Bentham
So if I “don’t own my Kindle books” but have downloaded on to my hard-drive, does Amazon have the right to
– demand that I erase a book
– inspect whether I have done so
And what if I have format shifted them so that I can use a non-Amazon app/program to read them?
Paul Ducklin
Format shifting, or transcoding, is an interesting issue in its own right (much like the right to decompile or disassemble software to understand it so you can make it work properly in your environment, or the right to jailbreak digitally-locked devices.)
AFAIK, these rights vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. For example, jailbreaking used to be illegal in the USA, but that was relaxed by the Library of Congress some years ago.
chez
Personally I don’t care about losing films because once you seen them I rarely want to bother seeing them again. Music is the thing that I really hate to lose and I have lost albums that I had put on iPlayer and they’ve just disappeared even though I thought I had backed them up. I know I am not the only one this has happened to.
Stephen M
This kind of crap is EXACTLY when I pirate every movie I own. I bought a DVD or digital download and it stops working because the DRM can’t find the seller’s service, who cares, the pirate bay will make it right. Whenever I get an ebook, the first thing that I do is deDRM it through Calibre. I then convert it so I have epub and mobi. I sideload to my kindle so Amazon can’t steal my content. My kindle has never connected to WiFi, so I also get no ads.
Paul Ducklin
By “piracy” do you mean that you steal it up front instead of paying for it (which is not cool)…
…or that you buy it and then go out of your way to archive it in case you later lose the copy you have installed (which is what Apple is advising here :-)?
Stephen M
Apple should have written their distribution contracts to allow eternal distribution to customers who bought the content when the full agreement is in place (basically, grandfather them in)
Bryan
That’s a really good idea, and after you mention it I’m surprised they haven’t done that.
DW
I see this article is bringing out the usual smug, “Well, what did he expect? He shouldn’t have been so ignorant so he deserves it. Whiny entitled fool,” responses I see too often. Yes, this is a first world problem, given the content. But the bait-and-switch is an old tactic and it won’t just affect a few people, it will affect everyone in some degree and none will be entitled to compensation. This kind of thing is how companies shave off even more money, with the shifty “no refunds” approach after “selling” something on a common and fair assumption. Same old shell game.
They know we’re thinking of this as the new and improved version of going to the store and buying the dvd or cd of the content we want, which item would be our own property even though the content is copyrighted. Like buying an official print of an original artwork, it would mean that copy would be ours to enjoy through whatever format we choose. As long as we don’t make money from it, we’re allowed to do with it as we please.
This is what most people will expect when deciding to go with a digital purchase. They see it as saving a little money, saving space, and having the purchase stored somewhere they were going to put it anyway. To then tell them they never really owned it isn’t clean business. It’s a back alley con job.
Paul Ducklin
The point here is that the headline is wrong, strictly speaking, and people aren’t reading past it. The chap bought a digital product, lost it and didn’t have a backup. When he went to try to download a new copy he found it was out of stock because the supplier had withdrawn it. In truth, no one “deleted his copy” of anything. Yes, it would be nice if Apple negotiated with copyright holders to ensure that existing owners could redownload even after the “no new sales allowed” date. Yes, it would be nice if the copyright holder would send out a warning for any last download date coming up (but you would then still have to download it in time and store it yourself).
Think of it as similar how some countries do driving licences. They expire after, say, 5 years. To renew them you need to show up at the relevant department and update your photo. If you don’t renew, you have to stop driving, even though your ability is unchanged. If you leave the licence expired for more than, say, 5 years, it lapses and can’t be renewed. You have to take your driving test again. If the licensing laws have changed in the interim you may be unable to re-acquire all the entitlements you had before that were “grandfathered in” on your old licence.
Anon
If you are serious about making that driving license analogy, then you must acquiesce that the iTunes button beside the price must be “license”, not “Buy”.
Paul Ducklin
Meh. He bought the movie. He could have downloaded it but didn’t. When he went back later on to watch it the holder of the rights to the movie said, “Bad luck, you’re a Canadian, we’ve turned against you lot.” I think the word “buy” is perfectly reasonable and matches common usage. No one would be confused if you talking about “buying” a TV licence or “buying” a bus pass, and both of those expire after a certain time.
Shayne
I’m dubious of the legality of Apples stance here. Non American judges are often dismissive of EULA fineprint noting that the *agreement* and the text outlining it are different things (Ie if I promise you to “buy” something , but the fineprint says “*rent”, then theres a good chance the judge is going to say “The word BUY is much more prominent on the storefront than “rent”, he owns that copy!). Essentially that by removing the download the product becomes unfit for purpose entitling the purchaser to a full refund. God knows how it’d work in the US. US law is loopyland.