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

arstechnica.com

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

#231

Post by sascha_sl »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #227
sascha_sl wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're "renting" something that can be effortlessly replicated ad infinitum. This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. > How much of what you pay for "digital rentals" goes to creators and towards running the actual infrastructure to do…

But with a book, you have that privilege in perpetuity, and you can loan, transfer, and resell it. Coincidentally, NFT’s got the “transfer” side of the equation, but forgot about the “privilege” part! The tokens are yours in perpetuity, and can be transferred to others, but it’s not at all clear what privilege they provide.

Well, I was hinting at smaller digital storefronts! Many of them do offer DRM free digital books.

I can't comment on NFTs beyond "wow, what a wasteful scam".

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

#232

Post by danaris »

jsnell wrote: post #20
danaris wrote: post #12

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26912118

Not a dupe, I think? There are two distinct lawsuits. The previous submission is just about the case on Apple making content impossible to download. But this article also discusses the case where Apple terminated an account with $25k of purchases.

This article references two different suits, and the headline is about the second one, but at least at the time I posted this comment, the part nearly everyone was commenting on was the first suit, with the "no reasonable person" line, which is the same suit as in the previous article.

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

#233

Post by Wowfunhappy »

jbay808 wrote: post #204
crazygringo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately, this would probably force them to treat purchase revenue as a liability on the accounting books.

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.)

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

#234

Post by beefield »

jbay808 wrote: post #204
crazygringo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately, this would probably force them to treat purchase revenue as a liability on the accounting books.

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.

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

#235

Post by fencepost »

dylan604 wrote: post #106
baryphonic wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sentence in the filing is true: no reasonable person would see her opinion about an event as a fact. Opinions are not facts. Powell's problem is that her "facts" used…

So if I "buy" an Apple M1 series computer, am I renting it or buying it? The only thing Apple can do to hardware is to quit supporting it via software updates, but I am still free to use it with the last supported software as long as it runs. (Depending on make/model/build quality, that may actually stop before software support ends like the 2016-2017 MBPs.)

There's pretty convincing evidence that you own that computer. Your ability to use it in some fashion (e.g. as a hammer) is not dependent on Apple permitting that use.

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

#236

Post by Wowfunhappy »

ImprovedSilence wrote: post #197
CJefferson wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Music does not have DRM (which is great!), but everything else you can purchase does—books, audiobooks, movies, apps, etc.

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

#237

Post by crazygringo »

sascha_sl wrote: post #218
colllectorof wrote: post #205

The reality is that most big tech companies want to get all the benefits of "going digital", while shifting all the costs or downsides of that move to the consumers. This is not accidental. This is a long-term strategy backed by an elaborate PR campaign. The campaign was so successful that most people aren't even aware of how bizarre the whole idea of "renting" digital content really is. You're "renting" something th…

> You're "renting" something that can be effortlessly replicated ad infinitum. This is only slightly less true for books and optical media. You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it. > How much of what you pay for "digital rentals" goes to creators and towards running the actual infrastructure to do…

> You are never paying for the paper or plastic - even on the lowest margins that's at most 10% of it - , you're paying for the privilege of consuming what's on it.

It's true the physical book manufacturing is only ~10% of the price.

But you're forgetting costs of shipping, warehousing, stocking, retail, etc. Separate from manufacturing, roughly 40% of what you pay for a book goes to the physical retailer, and that's actually the largest chunk.

When you add up all the costs of producing and transporting and selling the physical book to a customer (and the publisher taking back unsold copies), they make up the majority of a book's cost.

The actual "license of content" cost of a physical book is a minority of the price you pay.

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

#238

Post by crazygringo »

zelon88 wrote: post #200
Diggsey wrote: post #17

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 l…

I support this. But I do have questions. 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. How would winding down such a service work?

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.

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

#239

Post by crazygringo »

jjcon wrote: post #152
Diggsey wrote: post #17

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 l…

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.

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.

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

#240

Post by codegladiator »

dtx1 wrote: post #203

Hot Take: Just pirate everything and be done with it. Between 5 Suscription Services it would take to get the few TV Shows& Movies I care about, Privacy concerns and unethical behaviour like this i just can't be bothered to look for "legal" sources anymore when any decent private tracker has everything i need in one place anyway. The content mafia didn't get it with music, until perhaps spotify for a while and now th…

> Suscription Services

I like the term

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