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.
That's unreasonable, wouldn't be practical, and goes against precedent.
The analogy here is if you buy a vacuum cleaner from a store and it doesn't work because of a defect. You bring it back and get your money back.
The store isn't required to provide you with another working vacuum cleaner. If the vacuum cleaner is no longer manufactured, they're not required to find one in mint condition on eBay that's 10x or 100x the price.
If you got to consume the media you bought for months/years and you get a full refund, I'd say you have nothing to complain about.
On the contrary, this is with the precedent, damages due to breach of contract, theft, destruction of property, etc are cost to replace not the original cost. And specific performance (i.e. requiring someone perform the action to fulfill the contract) is available if monetary damages aren't calculable (i.e. there is no replacement on the market).
It’s standard to have terms in a contract that limits liability for any warranty to “monies actually received”. That’s in addition to any separate clauses that disclaim any and all explicit warranty. I’ve never signed a contract without such a clause and would bet it’s already a part of all of these terms of service.
Yes... because warranties are optional guarantees of fitness being sold on top of the product. We aren't talking about a warranty on the product here, we are talking about the product itself, I have never seen a contract that says "oh, and we can steal the product back from you in exchange for monies actually received", unsurprisingly, outside of digital assets.
And of course that term is common because the default terms for damages can go beyond that (e.g. if replacement value rises).
It’s standard to have terms in a contract that limits liability for any warranty to “monies actually received”.
And it's standard for statutory consumer protection laws to override any contractual terms and sometimes even make it illegal for vendors to suggest or imply that restrictions on the consumer's legal rights exist, at least in jurisdictions where consumer protection laws have teeth. Otherwise, every vendor (the big guy) could just require every consumer (the little guy) to sign away all their theoretical consumer rights as part of the purchase contract, and the theoretical rights would be worthless in practice.
If you got to consume the media you bought for months/years and you get a full refund, I'd say you have nothing to complain about.
This is why concepts like opportunity cost and consequential loss exist. While your arguments here seem reasonable, it is also reasonable to argue that harm has still been caused to the consumer, if they originally had a choice of vendors to buy from, a bad one they initially chose has refunded (only) their original purchase price, but the current market price is significantly higher.
If the basic principle of awarding compensation for damages is to make someone whole to the extent that this is possible, then the consumer in that scenario does still have something to complain about. This seems particularly relevant with digital products, where copies are entirely fungible and if the consumer has lost access they previously enjoyed then this was the result of the vendor's decisions around the technology, either actively revoking the access or deleting the material somehow, or taking some action like switching off a DRM server that indirectly causes the same end result.
Comparing physical objects to digital one is absolutely ludicrous. It costs almost nothing to copy a digital work.
The store does not lock your access to your vacuum while it's in your home. This may happen in the future with cars for example. Imagine you driving and suddenly your car dies because the car company "banned" you and locked your car.
> This may happen in the future with cars for example. Imagine you driving and suddenly your car dies because the car company "banned" you and locked your car.
Something very similar has already been happening for years with cars.
Car dealerships and lease/loan companies install remote tracking and deactivation systems in vehicles they sell/lease, with the idea being that if you don't pay your loan/lease, well the car just won't run.
There's been a number of cases where this has been abused. For instance in Canada a dealership locked a car they no longer owned[1] because the owner refused to pay a removal fee for the device.
Tesla has been removing features from second-hand cars[2], which is definitely trending in that direction.
Your analogy works against this point. If you were to deprive me of my use of a vacuum cleaner, then a court would absolutely rule that you make me whole. Those damages could be 100x the original price if that valuation can be demonstrated.
The store is bound to the terms of the warranty contract, which usually comes with limitations or allows for discretion when deciding how they shall honor it. But that applies to defects, not deprivation.
The bigger the asset, the more it approaches the parents suggestion.
If a rich person buys an expensive asset and it is defective, they're often owed for loss of use/revenue because they have the power to negotiate purchasing contracts that provide this. Us poors do not have this capability.
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.
I'd love for this to happen, not just for the amusement of seeing all the giant corporations suddenly jumping to DRM free distribution to save tons of money, and Tim Cook explaining for 5 minutes how innovative Apple was with reinventing their content distribution model.
I think Apple killed off DRM on music in the late 2000s and indeed, Steve Jobs was quite pleased with himself when announcing it.
(What's old is new again -- Epic is basically doing the same thing to Apple now. It all starts when an entrenched monopolist receives an open letter, apparently.)
The funny thing is, Apple had an iron grip on the music market because of DRM. If you wanted to license music for digital download, the music industry demanded DRM, and Apple had the only DRM consumers had any faith in. You couldn't use an alternative DRM scheme with iPods; FairPlay was Apple's proprietary technology and it was the only DRM iPods would recognize.
The music industry only caved on DRM specifically because they realized they had written Apple a blank check. Had Apple not had a long and storied history of trademark litigation from The Beatles' record label (also named Apple), they could have started directly signing artists themselves.
The difference between then and now with the Epic lawsuit is that iOS has no sideloading option. Going DRM-free meant you could sell music on iPods without paying Apple. For software, the closest equivalent would be webapps on iOS, but that usually entails rewriting significant parts of your app and losing access to certain functionality. You don't get push notifications, you can't access native UI so all your UI code has to be redeveloped to something worse, and so on.
Only if they use DRM. It’s not possible for me to lose access to the music I’ve purchased on iTunes, the games I’ve purchased on GoG, or the audiobooks I’ve purchased on libro.fm. (Except through my own fault, which shouldn’t apply.)
iTunes doesn't use DRM anymore? I haven't used it since I had a 1st gen ipod mini back in high school, but I remember only certain music was available without DRM and you used to have to pay extra for it.
When they dropped DRM, they raised the price a bit. I don’t remember them ever offering a choice, but I could be wrong—regardless, the slightly-more-expensive, DRM-Free songs are all that’s available today.
If you purchased music before the switch, that does still have DRM. (As an aside, you can get rid of it by setting up a VM with an old version of iTunes and Requiem.)
Well, question: suppose Steam ran out of money tomorrow. Do you think it would be acceptable for Valve to just delete all user accounts and games, if it saved them $100? Or do you think they have an obligation to customers to at least provide a single transfer of each game download to archive.org or someone, and give customers a magnet link for each game they own?
I very much doubt Valve has the required licensing to release the game they have on their store to any other platform (except for their own games). If Valve ever goes bankrupt and closes shop, it is likely that the users would lose access to their games.
That doesn't really pose any difficulties for the rule that you have to refund purchases when you terminate the user's access. Under this rule, Valve would incur a bunch of liabilities to its user base, which it would then mostly not pay because it's bankrupt.
They'd be pretty massive liabilities and would significantly eat into the recovery for other creditors, which could have effects on Valve's ability to issue debt, or might just mean that whenever Valve issues debt there's a clause making that debt senior to any future we-terminated-your-account liabilities.
Which employee is going to be responsible for doing all that, considering they just ran out of money and most definitely will not be getting a paycheck for executing this plan?
I think the slightly longer version is that going bankrupt is not usually a discrete step in time and that planning and negotiating between creditors, debtors, and the government is going on. So if there is a law there is a government interest in customers being treated right before, for instance, big owners get a payout from a sale of assets.
If there are literally no assets there's very little that can be done though, you could threaten the owners with jail but what can they even do if there is no money? If there were a law it would almost necessitate something more like unemployment insurance where companies are forced to hold insurance to deal with this in a predictable way if they shut down or close a customers account.
Actually, unemployment insurance might be a pretty good analogy. If a company goes out of business and you get laid off as an employee you get unemployment mostly paid for out of money the company paid to an insurance policy. In this case instead of being triggered by unemployment it's triggered by loss of access. In the same way, if a company is closing a lot of accounts their insurance rates go up.
I would imagine this not being the case if they can show that the customer downloaded a DRM free copy of the content at any point. After that it is the customer's problem to keep access to the downloaded copy.
Oh well, they should have thought about that before diving into a market thinking that they shouldn't bear any responsibility for their actions towards consumers.
It means that all revenue could at some point trigger a refund, for example if they want to exit the media distribution business and shutdown the services. That would be an expensive thing to do.
I suspect any law would state it has an availability period before refunds are not eligible.
That's only if they design the distribution system such that it relies on the existence of the servers. If I start up Age of Empires 2 (assume in a computer or older VM such that compatibility isn't an issue), I can start a multiplayer game through LAN without any issue. If I start up a game of Overwatch, I cannot play against somebody in the same room without connecting through Blizzard's servers.
It is perfectly reasonable for a company to be liable for refunds if they want to deliberately take products or features away from users. In order for a company to avoid this liability, they must provide a way for those features to still be available to users, even if the company no longer supports the product.
This is pretty easy and straightforward to legislate. A media company that provides distribution of individual works (like Steam or Apple, as opposed to subscription services like Netflix), must provide a method for users to easily and automatically back up all purchased content. A company that runs servers necessary to the use of a program (e.g. matchmaking servers for video games) must provide the server executable, in a form that can run on currently-available commodity hardware, and must allow the client to select a privately-owned software. Companies that don't meet these requirements would still hold full liability for refunds if they remove product features later on.
Warranties are for things that break on their own. If the manufacturer of a physical product broke into your house and smashed it with a sledgehammer, they'd absolutely be on the hook for what they did, warranty or no warranty.
I believe you have to put aside some portion of the cost of the item as a liability. So say you sold a $100 item that cost $70 and the average cost of providing warranty service per item is calculated to be $10. Then you would have to set aside $10 of the $100 as a liability.
Perhaps, but it's more likely that they'd figure out how to retain a read-only account - one with basic settings for email/password that could be changed, but everything else was static. No purchases, no email, no uploads, etc.
I know literally nothing about accounting, but does it really work that way? I figured you would just be able to count the portion of purchases you expect to be refunded as a liability, rather than all purchases.
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?
Indeed. And the model makes this very clear too. On Netflix there is a button 'watch', while on iTunes and many others, the button says 'buy', 'purcase' etc. One implies a transaction, the other implies using already accessible content.
I doubt it is EOL. There is demand for "owning", so there is a business-model there. It might be shrinking or changing, but at least for a niche, it will stay.
For example e-books. I try to buy as many from the authors (or their publishers) themselves. Surprising how often an author sells their book themselves. DRM-free, almost always cheaper. Owned-by-me. As opposed to e.g. my "kobo", which I cannot backup and download for that inevitable moment that Rakuten/Kobo decides to close my account, "pivot" or stop offering services.
I’m reminded of a parody report noting Netflix was trialing a “browse only” plan, so you and your partner can argue endlessly about what to watch, but never have to make a choice.
And crucially, from the consumer's perspective, this isn't unreasonable. Unless you watch only rarely, you probably aren't paying anything like the full market price of a permanent copy of each movie or TV show you watch on Netflix, just as in days gone by you paid much less when you rented a movie on tape from the video store instead of buying. You might rationally prefer to pay a smaller amount for library-style access to a large pool of content for a certain period rather than the full purchase price of every specific piece of content you watch, and in that case, the deal is in your interests as well as Netflix's. Now, if a supplier started charging around the same amount as a full purchase would have cost but still strongly restricted the associated use of the content, that would start to look abusive.
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.
Then make it non-DRM downloadable content that will be playable forever at the discretion of the consumer, like music bought on iTunes, then. Or at least mention the period for when the licensing will be honored during “purchase” and stick to it.
Honestly I don’t understand anyone having any sympathy for publishers or Apple. They were the ones who chose to use the current method.
- Explicitly advertise that you're buying access to the content for x years, not buying it outright
- Allow for non-DRM content download either as standard, or as a guaranteed backup option
- If a company goes bankrupt, bankruptcy proceedings ensure that users' content licenses are transferred to another provider at no charge, funded with liquidation proceeds -- with priority over contractors, lenders, investors, etc.
Whether it explicitly advertises buying content for X years is hardly relevant in this case. The issue is that Apple claims the right to shut it down at any time. If they promised 5 years and shut down the account after a month, the same issue would come up.
Lots of similar replies. I meant if a DVD costs $25 and a digial download comes with a long-tail(forever per the comment I relied to) then how much should it cost? More I would imagine.
Sure they could advertise longer rental lengths, or clearly tie it to the business (which is probably buried in the ToS already). But if congress legislates digital purchases to be available forever with a 100% refund attached, how much should that cost? It seems wholly uneconomical from a provider side. We all work in IT, but in an enterprise situation, you know how quickly LTS is de-prioritized.
I would price a true forever digital licence in the $100's because you have to account for so many variables like storage(what country(s) can I store this movie in), bandwidth (what quality must I provide), and regions(where can I watch this).
I would love a world where I can stream whatever, whenever, forever after a purchase but someone has to manage that, and forever is an insane horizon. Even 100 years is crazy! WWI-ish to today!
And if they offered DRM free downloads, are you ok with it being one time? What if it was watermarked? Would you be willing to secure your copies? At some level a business will want to make money on their product and prevent piracy.
I dunno. I want cheap, widely available, drm free media too, but I understand why it hasn't come to be yet.
There could be other ways to manage it, like specifying how long the rental would be valid for (I think iTunes started this way with movies), instead of alluding to the idea that you are buying it forever as part if a personal library.
If the download had no DRM, and I could freely copy it, I would have much more sympathy. Usually transfering to another machine is hard, or impossible.
Do files from itunes have drm on it these days? I thought waaay back in the beginning they did have it, but then at some point they went drm free. (At least fir music) At what point did they sworch back?
> 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'd be in favor of the law having a clause like the "No Surrender of Others' Freedom" clause of the GPL. Basically saying "If you provide movies like this, then you must make them available without DRM. If you have other legal or contractual requirements that forbid you from making them available without DRM, then you can't make them available at all."
Moreover, DRM prevents copyright content from entering the public domain. In my personal opinion, anything that's not available without DRM shouldn't get copyright - otherwise it subverts the deal at the centre of copyright.
The way around this would be to have a way to lodge a DRM free copy, which would be released to the public domain when the copyright expires, or on abandonment (so people wouldn't be denied access if the company didn't keep their servers running).
Copyright is not a natural right, the balance is totally out of whack. Copyright terms have become abusively long; the deal is not fair anymore.
Absolutely agreed. I'm of the opinion that anything under DRM, and any closed-source software, should not be eligible for copyright. When a work enters the public domain, society is allowed to build upon that work. If extant copies of the work are not in a form that allows others to build upon, then that right is infringed.
any closed-source software, should not be eligible for copyright
This is how you get software companies running almost everything on their own servers, subscription-only, updates-mandatory, so no-one ever gets a copy of the work themselves and copyright is irrelevant. I think it is abundantly clear by now that this is not necessarily a beneficial direction for the industry to be moving, at least not from the point of view of purchaser/user rights and future-proofing.
OK, so now only foreign software companies are providing these services and you aren't even getting the tax revenues or employment. That doesn't seem like an improvement.
As long as we're pretending things that will never happen anyway, let's also pretend there's a Berne Convention 2.0 to cut out basically every suitable host country.
Alternatively, how about a law that no government-owned systems may directly or indirectly use any services where the source isn't available? That would be a big enough seed that the viral/transitive nature of the first law would probably spread to everything.
The thing is, everything I first described already happens. Software companies have been moving towards SAAS and online game servers and other ways of running key parts of the code only on their own systems for some time, and the initial motivation for that was often copy protection even if today there are other advantages from the developer's perspective.
Copyright is not a natural right, the balance is totally out of whack. Copyright terms have become abusively long; the deal is not fair anymore.
On the other hand, the inability of small copyright holders to effectively enforce their theoretical rights is also unfair and totally out of whack, but in the other direction.
I am sympathetic to the idea that DRM shouldn't be able to lock people out of accessing works they have a legitimate right to access, and I agree that such abuse needs to be dealt with through updating the legal frameworks for copyright and consumer rights.
However, I think to credibly change the law as you suggest (so, essentially, a publisher can choose DRM or copyright but not both) you'd also have to introduce meaningful criminal penalties for possibly willful and certainly commercial copyright infringement and treat it akin to fraud or theft. Otherwise, why wouldn't the little guy who has a genuine concern about copying reducing the value of the work they are publishing forego copyright entirely and rely only on the DRM, with no rights even theoretically for society as a whole to ever benefit from that work?
>>Moreover, DRM prevents copyright content from entering the public domain. In my personal opinion, anything that's not available without DRM shouldn't get copyright - otherwise it subverts the deal at the centre of copyright.
Inasmuch as I am sympathetic to the argument, how would a government force DRMless software without attacking encryption itself or violating a company's 1st amendment rights to sell whatever digital products as it sees fit? DRM is protected speech so long as encryption or encryption schemes are protected speech (malware a la Sony's rootkit notwithstanding).
>>Copyright is not a natural right, the balance is totally out of whack. Copyright terms have become abusively long; the deal is not fair anymore.
Copyright isn't a natural right but neither is someone else's content or products. Without copyright, every smart person would keep their inventions as trade secrets with limited disclosures/demonstrations that, like Greek fire, will eventually be lost to the ages. While copyright terms can be abusive and long, that alone does not make the concept invalid.
The government doesn't necessarily have to take an offense stance at all. Just removing the legislative protection for DRM schemes would go as long way. You could make it a condition that companies that want to gain legal defense for their DRM'd content must register a DRM-free version with, for example, the Library of Congress.
I agree with removing DMCA protections for circumventing DRM instead of outlawing or creating legislative disincentives for DRM outright (that would be a can of worms). However, it still doesn't sound like a full solution. Registration of the sort you propose, if done correctly, could work for e-books or movies. But what does that kind of registration look like for server- or cloud-based content (e.g. MMOs, subscription-only software) or video games that constantly get constant updates and DLCs?
I can think of a number of possible solutions (update the DRM-free copy the LoC has as you push patches out, for example).
I think more interesting is the broader principle of withholding legal protection unless the company proactively provides a solution. Trying to mandate behavior by companies seems difficult to achieve politically, and leaves the government with the responsibility of enforcement. The enforcement/compliance work then scales based on the amount of creative material released with DRM. It seems unlikely that a government agency will keep up.
On the other hand, it costs the government nothing to withhold legal protection. Making it the company's responsibility to provide a DRM-free copy (or eventual activation keys, etc., details will vary) to a trusted government entity in order to opt-in to legal protection of their copyright scales 1-to-1. It also aligns the incentives of both sides of the copyright problem. Companies have the full protection of law during the period in which the copyright exists and the public benefits from works entering the public domain automatically. As an added bonus, the government has a central place to invest resources in archival and preservation of the huge swaths of our culture that we're currently in danger of losing. I'm very grateful for the Internet Archive but it is a shame that they have to operate based on volunteer donations. It would be great to have a means to take a means for the companies who created the content to fund is archival (via nominal fees for artifact registration).
The moment legal protection is withheld on disagreeable terms is the moment that copyrights become a less popular vehicle for defending a holder's rights. Despite what you might you might think, that's not a good thing. Copyrights are positive incentives for disclosure (but not necessarily for continued availability) of information. It is in the interest of a government for one to publicly disclose information on the sciences and the useful arts. Preemptively neutering a holder's defense to his copyright doesn't disincentives DRM. On the contrary, it encourages stronger, broader trade secret protections as well as non-disclosure and exclusion agreements with regards to both the content and DRM. That would be a blow to libraries just as much as it would archival sites.
The problem comes in when unbreakable DRM is introduced, including DRM that depends on an external server to provide access to licensed content. If the copy protection remains uncrackable after the copyright term expires, or if the server it depends on is no longer available, it amounts to theft from the public domain, pure and simple.
Content producers should be forced to choose between legal protection for their copyrights and technical protection. They should never have been permitted to claim both.
One doesn't need DRM to shut down a server and keep the assets/ net code from seeing the light of day. Plenty of MMOs have shut down with years of people's lives down the drain. Even if you were right about how companies with DRM shouldn't obtain copyrights, I don't see how uncrackability of DRM would be a significant limiting factor when an off switch and forgotten source code is just as capable in doing the same. It wouldn't solve the fundamental issue of, to quote you, theft from the public domain.
That's a separate question (but equally worth addressing). The point here, though, is that copyright is an explicit bargain with the public domain, and DRM makes it a one-sided one.
Yeah, that was a happy accident of market forces. Apple had become the juggernaut of music sales and the industry was desperate to get out from under them. They started letting other licensees go DRM free and Apple negotiated it from them at a markup.
I think the reason we never saw a similar model for movies and TV shows is because Hollywood was terrified of what Apple had done to the music industry.
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.
This is, in general, Valve's approach with Steam users. A user cheats on servers using Valve Anti-Cheat? Banned from all of those servers, but not from the games themselves. A user spams heinous garbage in the forums? Banned from posting in the forums. I think one of the only things that will actually get an entire account disabled is charging back a purchase.
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.
If I buy a semester at a private school, I still have to pay for the entire semester if I'm expelled (sometimes a smaller but still substantial early leave amount).
I know neither of our analogies mirror exactly is going on, but that's part of the point. Maybe this is a different class of "ownership". There seems to be many classes already close to what Apple wants.
I'm not sure who will win. I hope it's not Apple, but I've already agreed to worse agreements getting through high school and college.
But schools are not advertising to the public that they are “buying” the class and no reasonable consumer who pays tuition believes a 1 time payment of tuition permits them to attend the class indefinitely.
On the other hand Apple purposefully advertises movies as “rentals” or “purchases” sure more sophisticated individuals know better (usually those in the tech industry savvy to the willful and deceptive marketing of the tech companies) but the average consumer understands they have purchased the ownership rights of the movie.
Continuing with a reasonable standard if you are suspended/expelled you are generally entitled to due process (certainly in public schools), on the other hand if you violate Apple TOS you may not have the same due process, but it is reasonable to assume they will not delete your data And purchases without the opportunity to retrieve the same. Otherwise it’s a license to steal, they could claim the bank accounts you have connected to Apple Pay are forfeited to Apple, they can publish your emails/photos to harass and embarrass you, etc...
For assets in the physical world, the provider can have legitimate reasons for not refunding you the lost access that you originally paid for, on the scale of a month or a semester, due to the difficulty of them finding a replacement buyer/renter of that asset for the remaining duration. Something "seasonal" like school enrolment is a perfect example of that.
For digital assets, though, the period that you wouldn't expect to be refunded for should be measured in nanoseconds.
The other huge difference of course is that people don't buy perpetual access to a dorm room, whereas they believe they do for digital goods. "Forever minus ten nanoseconds" is very similar to "forever", so the refund should be close to 100%.
If you are expelled from a school, the school is currently unable to rescind access to previous education they've provided you, although the analogy starts to fall apart since education and digital media are not directly comparable.
> 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]
We need to revise all consumer protection laws. Way more than we did a few years ago.
I would start with, Mandatory Arbitration.
Let consumers take these companies, including credit card companies, to court. What is the limit for small claims---$25,000? Companies might treat customers different? I wouldn't mind doing away with Terms if Service all together. If a company can't act within our laws without a 10 page TOS, so be it. Or, maybe strict protections for small companies, and nill for large companies. Companies that can afford to investigate claims against them?
All my belly aching here won't do a thing though. These companies have bought our representatives.
I'm waiting for a day someone has a successful website, like Hacker News, where people could offer suggestions to their representatives directly.
I don't think I'll ever see that day because those in charge know these matters are above the intellect of most Americans, and most Americans would rather escape the inequities of real life, especially on line?
I just looked up that 2008 Consumer Protection Act.
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.
Orwell believed euphemisation was the key element of said tradition. Food for thought, perhaps. Not everything needs to be turned up to 11 all the time, explicitly or not. Chill.
That's a false dichotomy, but I'll offer this for an answer:
"Yes, it should be reserved for those with high status, and high status should be reserved for people who are chosen by and accountable to the people over whom they have power."
See, I strongly disagree. I believe that, whatever my status, I have the right to associate with whomever I please. Which means I can shun whomever I please. I can also talk with whomever I please, including about people I'm avoiding.
So you can have a 1st Amendment, or you can have your Designated Excommunicators, but you can't have both.
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.
Complete refund (or rather whatever it takes to make the customer whole) is what is reasonable for for cases like this where the provider cuts off access. If they have a problem with that, they can implement other solutions that do not cut off access.
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.
Because the value of those thing depreciate over time and therefore a full refund doesn’t accurately reflect current value.
A movie is more valuable directly after release, same is true for games. Additionally a movie/game is more valuable to those who have not yet seen/played 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.
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.