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.
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.