Apple sued for terminating account with $25k worth of apps and videos • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by jaimex2 » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 2:05 AM UTC

I hope this ends with a legal requirement to refund all purchases if an account is ever terminated on digital platforms.

It's a leading reason why I don't purchase subscriptions to streaming services or "buy" from digital stores. If it's not tangible I'm not buying it.

I'd also like to see a legal requirement for cloud services to allow access to stored content if an account is terminated. None of this "Our bot thinks you're bad so your accounts forever suspended without a human appeal system. Say goodbye to all your photos"

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

#362

Post by Silhouette » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 2:19 AM UTC

alex_g wrote: post #167

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A netflix subscription is access to content, not a purchase of content.

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.

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

#363

Post by Silhouette » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 2:27 AM UTC

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #96

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…

> 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.

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.

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

#364

Post by utopcell » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 2:35 AM UTC

cipher_system wrote: post #5

realusername wrote: post #3

> Apple countered by arguing that “no reasonable consumer would believe” that content purchased through iTunes would be available on the platform indefinitely Remember this sentence to change your mind for the next time you see some movie to buy online.

I always assumed they would be available as long as Apple or iTunes doesn't go under. Guess i'm not a reasonable consumer but luckily I haven't spent much money on them.

It's not until Apple goes under: it's until whatever licensing deal Apple got for some movie is over.

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

#365

Post by Silhouette » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 2:35 AM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #256

josephcsible wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acces…

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?

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

#366

Post by Silhouette » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 2:38 AM UTC

MereInterest wrote: post #262

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acces…

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.

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

#367

Post by cheese_van » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 2:41 AM UTC

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #105

realusername wrote: post #3

> Apple countered by arguing that “no reasonable consumer would believe” that content purchased through iTunes would be available on the platform indefinitely Remember this sentence to change your mind for the next time you see some movie to buy online.

> Remember this sentence to change your mind for the next time you see some movie to buy online. If you use iTunes, and "add to library," like I do, you'll see how often albums get removed or replaced or remixed. It's unnecessary and unnerving. The labels are constantly faffing about with albums. Every couple of months, I'll go to play an album, and find that it only has, say, 2 songs in it. Sometimes I can go back a…

I have "purchased" movies from Amazon, movies for which Amazon later lost streaming rights, and which are no longer in their catalogue - and so my "purchase" was temporary. I am sure their EULA expressly permits this but it's irrelevant now as I have learned my lesson. I now longer "purchase" digital products unless I can download them after purchase. When this first occurred, I was angry. Now, I just consider myself educated to avoid Amazon at all cost.

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

#368

Post by eevilspock » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 2:46 AM UTC

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 don’t think “forever” is a promise anyone can realistic/honestly make.

As others have pointed out, refunds aren’t realistic either, and the path can be abused.

A better solution is that you should be able to download your purchases when your account is terminated (or even when it’s active).

An active account should not be required to use your downloaded purchases.

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

#369

Post by Silhouette » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 2:47 AM UTC

thathndude wrote: post #36

black_puppydog wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid you might be right about 2, but wrt 1 I think you can absolutely sue your way out of a contract if it was made after blatantly false advertising, no?

That’s correct. Am a lawyer, not giving legal advice. A very common term in contracts is what is called a merger clause, and what it says essentially is that the contract forms the entire agreement of the parties, and that any oral representations not contained in the contract are irrelevant and to be completely disregarded. But there are courts that hold that a merger clause is not absolute and has its limits. Make…

A very common term in contracts is what is called a merger clause, and what it says essentially is that the contract forms the entire agreement of the parties, and that any oral representations not contained in the contract are irrelevant and to be completely disregarded. But there are courts that hold that a merger clause is not absolute and has its limits.

There are also places, like here in the UK, where statutory consumer rights law explicitly says that trying to hide behind those clauses doesn't stand up. You can't have a salesperson answer a consumer's questions about a product, and then when the consumer finds the product doesn't match the information they were given after buying it, argue that your Ts & Cs say anything the salesperson said before the purchase has no weight. Moreover, if you make a habit of trying, you're likely to attract not just action by the consumer themselves but also the attention of regulators who may be considerably more powerful than any individual consumer.

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

#370

Post by codeisawesome » Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 2:50 AM UTC

> Apple also advertise the fact that consumers can keep their purchased files in the cloud for later download. And when using certain settings on iOS and Fire devices, Apple will automatically remove from a device content and apps that haven’t been accessed in a while, requiring the user to download them once more.

Oh gosh, there’s a huge problem on iOS & iPadOS with this. Files app and Books app (and even Photos) will prune files from the local file system to save space. This is alright in itself, but the user has very little to no control over which files are selected algorithmically for this process (there is no “never prune THIS file/folder” option). What’s much worse, there are no SLAs on how quickly the download will occur. I don’t know if it’s regional, but in Singapore I’ve found books app & files app never finish downloading content especially if you request for multiple files - even on WiFi & power. I work around this by storing zip files which I download and extract each time - because at least a single file might succeed downloading (higher chance of success).

This is a huge problem for someone who relies on iCloud when I need a file urgently on the go and all I have is 4G.