Apple sued for terminating account with $25k worth of apps and videos

All these "stores" have the same wording in their TOS: "this content is licensed, not sold", et c. They all use the terms "buy", "sale", "purchases", "owned", and other similar words in the UI. There's a clear contradiction here, and they shouldn't get it both ways.

It's very obvious (to those who know how FAANG walled gardens work) that it's a rental and contingent upon them not evaporating your account for some stupid reason. It's entirely non-obvious to the layperson.

Courts clarifying the first sale doctrine here would help a lot.

IMO, one should be able to resell or transfer software or media licenses they've already paid for. Moving online from physical media shouldn't suddenly shaft the consumer and make their media purchases evaporate when they die or lose their email address.

Really surprised to see Apple taking this approach. You'd think they could have come up with something less offensive to their users. This is the exact same line Sidney Powell is using in her defense against Dominion: "'No Reasonable Person' Thought Her Election Fraud Claims Were Fact" [0]. Amused but not surprised to see this from her, I am quite aghast to see this from Apple.

The fact is, just like any reasonable person would believe that claims of election fraud are claims of election fraud, any reasonable person would certainly believe that when Apple says "buy" they mean to purchase and to own outright in perpetuity without the possibility of repossession. I wonder what effect this will have on the App Store, where apps are "sold" using the same language.

[0] https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2021/03/22/facing-def...

Not the main point of the case, but I am curious how his account was terminated. Apple does that much less often than Google does (you're not posting death threats in YouTube comments using your Apple account). I'm also curious how he purchased $25k of apps and videos in only two years.

Even if this is an extreme case, I hope that Apple (and other platforms) are forced to change their language and/or provide more guarantees of access.

I think Apple and Amazon (an Amazon lawsuit is linked inside the article) will argue that they are similar to video rental stores like Blockbuster back when it was in business. However, Blockbuster did have physical copies of movies available to purchase in the form of VHS, and DVDs so I would argue that Blockbuster calling itself a store was still alright even though it might have done more business in rentals.

I’m not how Apple and Amazon’s respective media rental businesses would rename themselves to remove the word “store” e.g. App Store to App Rental. I do agree that both companies, Google, and others mislead potential customers by labeling what is essentially conditional, long-term rentals / leases as ownership.

They should just force all these vendors to relabel those buttons to "Rent" or equivalent.