Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 403 posts

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

#381

Post by Silhouette »

josephcsible wrote: post #376
Silhouette wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK, so now only foreign software companies are providing these services and you aren't even getting the tax revenues or employment. That doesn't seem like an improvement.

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

#382

Post by Gaelan »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #330
ajnin wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much doubt Valve has the required licensing to release the game they have on their store to any other platform (except for their own games). If Valve ever goes bankrupt and closes shop, it is likely that the users would lose access to their games.

That doesn't really pose any difficulties for the rule that you have to refund purchases when you terminate the user's access. Under this rule, Valve would incur a bunch of liabilities to its user base, which it would then mostly not pay because it's bankrupt. They'd be pretty massive liabilities and would significantly eat into the recovery for other creditors, which could have effects on Valve's ability to issue de…

> there's a clause making that debt senior to any future we-terminated-your-account liabilities

How does that work? Surely that’d have to be something agreed to by both the lender and the customers?

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

#383

Post by shmde »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #317
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…

You don't need to pirate it, you can just continue to buy physical media. CDs are unencrypted. The encryption on DVDs and blu-rays has long been broken. I continue to buy physical discs, rip them into my library, and then keep the discs as backups. It's the best of all worlds, and is both legal (in most places) and moral.

What if you cannot buy the blu ray in your region and wanna watch a particular movie ?

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

#384

Post by fuzxi »

kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote: post #342
bobbyi_settv wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could this lead to people intentionally violating terms to try to get their account terminated so that they can get money back for every in app purchase, etc, they've ever made?

Yes which is why this won't ever happen. It should just be illegal to wholly terminate an account. If someone is breaking ToS, ban them from doing the ToS breaking thing like posting or commenting. No reason to terminate the entire account.

This is, in general, Valve's approach with Steam users. A user cheats on servers using Valve Anti-Cheat? Banned from all of those servers, but not from the games themselves. A user spams heinous garbage in the forums? Banned from posting in the forums. I think one of the only things that will actually get an entire account disabled is charging back a purchase.

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

#385

Post by SoiGubz »

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.

But Apple didn't go under, they cut the victim off.

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

#386

Post by josephcsible »

Silhouette wrote: post #381
josephcsible wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

OK, so now only foreign software companies are providing these services and you aren't even getting the tax revenues or employment. That doesn't seem like an improvement.

As long as we're pretending things that will never happen anyway, let's also pretend there's a Berne Convention 2.0 to cut out basically every suitable host country.

Alternatively, how about a law that no government-owned systems may directly or indirectly use any services where the source isn't available? That would be a big enough seed that the viral/transitive nature of the first law would probably spread to everything.

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

#387

Post by grishka »

dane-pgp wrote: post #252
grishka wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also I don't think there ever were physical audio formats with DRM? CD came out way before piracy was anyone's concern, and then it was too late to change anything. On the other hand, all digital video formats have always had the technical capability for DRM, starting with DVD.

> Also I don't think there ever were physical audio formats with DRM? MiniDiscs had "copy protection"[0] and this format was supported by major record labels[1]. They were first released in 1992. > all digital video formats have always had the technical capability for DRM, starting with DVD. By starting with DVD, you're skipping the DRM-free formats of Betamax, VHS, and LaserDisc then? Unless by "had the technical ca…

> MiniDiscs had "copy protection"[0] and this format was supported by major record labels[1].

From what I can tell, pre-recorded MiniDiscs were never popular. People bought blank ones and recorded their own pirated mp3s on there.

But, yes, that makes me technically wrong with my first comment because it is a physical audio format that has the technical capability for DRM.

> By starting with DVD, you're skipping the DRM-free formats of Betamax, VHS, and LaserDisc then?

They're all analog and so you can't make an exact copy. At least not without obscenely expensive studio-grade equipment. Yes, that didn't stop people from making copies of VHS tapes, and yes, you could tell how many times it was copied by the picture quality.

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

#388

Post by mackrevinack »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #317
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…

You don't need to pirate it, you can just continue to buy physical media. CDs are unencrypted. The encryption on DVDs and blu-rays has long been broken. I continue to buy physical discs, rip them into my library, and then keep the discs as backups. It's the best of all worlds, and is both legal (in most places) and moral.

ive never been able to stomach that idea of having a physical collection of all my favourite movies or albums. some day in the future when you kick the bucket they will all be thrown out. maybe if you are lucky they might be sold off to some other collector or recycled but i would bet that eventually a lot of it will end up in a landfill somewhere.

it just seems like such an absurd idea that everyone would have their own collection of media like this. all of that plastic being generated and then eventually thrown out just so you can have a dvd sit on a shelf where you will use it once every few years, once a decade or maybe once and then never again. i don't know if moral is a word i would use to describe all that

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

#389

Post by berkes »

sebasvisser wrote: post #201
berkes wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. And the model makes this very clear too. On Netflix there is a button 'watch', while on iTunes and many others, the button says 'buy', 'purcase' etc. One implies a transaction, the other implies using already accessible content.

Might be the reason for Apple Arcade...because the buying-but-not-owning-business model is EOL

I doubt it is EOL. There is demand for "owning", so there is a business-model there. It might be shrinking or changing, but at least for a niche, it will stay.

For example e-books. I try to buy as many from the authors (or their publishers) themselves. Surprising how often an author sells their book themselves. DRM-free, almost always cheaper. Owned-by-me. As opposed to e.g. my "kobo", which I cannot backup and download for that inevitable moment that Rakuten/Kobo decides to close my account, "pivot" or stop offering services.

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

#390

Post by Silhouette »

josephcsible wrote: post #386
Silhouette wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so now only foreign software companies are providing these services and you aren't even getting the tax revenues or employment. That doesn't seem like an improvement.

As long as we're pretending things that will never happen anyway, let's also pretend there's a Berne Convention 2.0 to cut out basically every suitable host country. Alternatively, how about a law that no government-owned systems may directly or indirectly use any services where the source isn't available? That would be a big enough seed that the viral/transitive nature of the first law would probably spread to every…

The thing is, everything I first described already happens. Software companies have been moving towards SAAS and online game servers and other ways of running key parts of the code only on their own systems for some time, and the initial motivation for that was often copy protection even if today there are other advantages from the developer's perspective.
Post reply on HN