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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

#371

Post by jjcon »

crazygringo wrote: post #239
jjcon wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This would totally make sense to me - complete refund though doesn’t pass a sniff test

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

#372

Post by jjcon »

edgyquant wrote: post #172
jjcon wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#373

Post by pureliquidhw »

crazygringo wrote: post #198
pureliquidhw wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are lots of possible solutions: - 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 ove…

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.

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

#374

Post by rochak »

visarga wrote: post #328
cipher_system wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Guess i'm not a reasonable consumer but luckily I haven't spent much money on them. I used to have an account on which I spent at least $400. After an attempt to change the email address associated to the account I got locked out. It seems the same email address was used to create a different account in the past and the move just destroyed my access and any possible recourse. So I switched to Android and stayed on…

And people look at me with gaze when I tell them that I don’t want iCloud. I would much rather pay for a service I can use on any platform so that I can switch out of Apple whenever I want to. Apple fanboys will grill me for this, but at least I will be saving my future self from headaches.

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

#376

Post by josephcsible »

Silhouette wrote: post #366
MereInterest wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So make that illegal too. Basically write the AGPL into the law.

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

#377

Post by YeBanKo »

> Apple countered by arguing that “no reasonable consumer would believe” that content purchased through iTunes would be available on the platform indefinitely.

I find myself reasonable and if I purchased something, I expect it to have access to it as long as the platform exists. And if they are planning to go out of content hosting business or close one’s account, then I would expect that they provide a reasonable notice and a way to download all the purchases content.

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

#378

Post by jcranmer »

kemayo wrote: post #178
lettergram wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why Sidney Powell was brought up here, but that’s ongoing litigation and neither side has emerged victorious. Further, the claims in that article were odd and don’t seem to match the filing Sydney Powell actually made: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.225699/... So I don’t think that’s necessarily a great source to cite. EDIT: In either case, these are lawsuits. There’s a few things that…

This is a bit of a tangent from the actual article we're nominally discussing, of course, but... > Further, the claims in that article were odd and don’t seem to match the filing Sydney Powell actually made So, the bit of the article I can read says "Attorneys for Sidney Powell are asking a federal judge to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against her, claiming that “no reasonable person” thought the pro-Trump lawy…

What Sidney Powell is trying to do in the proceedings is to argue that the allegedly defamatory statements are part of legal proceedings. Legal pleadings are by definition protected speech and cannot be defamatory.

The problem she faces is that, while the lawsuits themselves are protected, she held several press conferences and made the same speech in other venues where it is not so protected. Furthermore, by making essentially the same speech in legal pleadings, portraying the speech as opinion or hyperbole and not factual statements (the usual defense in a defamation lawsuit) would mean admitting to committing sanctionable offenses in filing those pleadings. But they're trying to still play that defense as well, which leads to the awkward conclusion "it's so outlandlishly false that no one would believe it to be fact, merely a fact we're arguing is true in a court case," which kind of makes it more likely they get slapped both with the sanctions for making false statements before the court and being the rare defendant to lose a defamation suit.

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

#379

Post by YeBanKo »

crazygringo wrote: post #146
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…

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.

I would suggest as an alternative to a refund a way to download you content with reasonable notice(30-60 days) in open formats.

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

#380

Post by npsomaratna »

gpm wrote: post #79
rascul wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the courts are going to look for legality instead of fairness.

A reasonably degree of fairness is a requirement to be legal, otherwise the contract is deemed "unconscionable" and void.

Plus, this would a contract of adhesion—and courts hate contracts of adhesion and try to interpret them in favor of the consumer as far as possible.
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