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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

#391

Post by TeMPOraL »

jordan_curve wrote: post #320
TeMPOraL wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't say people are happy. "They accept" is much closer. They accept the mediocre, because there's nothing they can do about it, and they don't understand how any of it works.

I’m happy. It’s not really a big deal to me if my uploaded content is removed and I think the service that Spotify provides is worth more than what I pay for it.

I'm glad, and I don't want to make you stop being happy. Happiness is more important than technology fads of the week.

That said, I'm no longer using Spotify, and disappearing songs had a lot to do with it. I've been paying for a premium account for some 6-7 years, way longer than I should - it took me over a year to notice that I'm not actually using it, because half of my favorite songs are gone, and whenever I search for something particular, half of the time it's not there (or worse, there's some shitty cover of it). And it's not just the catalog that suffered since - also the UI of their mobile app rotten over time, and became incomprehensive.

But back in ~2012 - 2015 I sure as hell was happy with their service, and evangelized it to all my friends, and I did feel it's worth more than what I'm paying for it.

I guess losing music on Spotify isn't that big of a deal for most people, because - extrapolating music-related behavior from a couple dozen non-tech people I've observed over the years - the most popular music player isn't Spotify, it's YouTube. And YouTube does have it all, at least for now.

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

#392

Post by Mindwipe »

vbsteven wrote: post #73
Mindwipe wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is zero chance of DRM free downloads. Literally zero.

In which context? Services like Qobuz and Bandcamp support DRM-free downloads for your purchases so it is definitely possible. IMHO chances for DRM-free downloads from Apple are very very slim. But not zero.

> In which context?

In the context of "as a direct consequence of this lawsuit." Which, y'know, is pretty obvious from the parent comment it's a reply to?

Given downloads are possible even with DRM, that isn't even raised in the suit itself. The lawsuit hinges on the loss of availability of further streaming of the titles.

There is literally zero chance.

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

#393

Post by Jochim »

m-p-3 wrote: post #93
syshum wrote: post #61

Companies want people to be happy in a post-ownership society, Apple and Amazon are part of that I hope more people start resisting this narrative that all or our property and in essences our lives should be leased / rented...

I'm okay if the terms of the rental or subscription are clearly defined. For example, I have no problem subscribing to Netflix and I expect to lose access to its library if I stop paying. What is not okay is buying a perpetual license and lose access to it because our big tech overlord decided someone shouldn't and go away with the money. At least locking the account and forbidding access to buying more content would…

I think having the option to rent or subscribe is fine and it might actually be of benefit to some people. However, there is a problem when the option to own a product disappears because a rental/subscription model is more profitable, which we're seeing more and more. It's a pretty strong example of corporate interests not lining up with human/societal interests.

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

#394

Post by LocalH »

threatofrain wrote: post #98
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…

Apple can just rent you their entire catalogue similar to Apple Arcade or Music, then nobody would say you own the entire selection, just like it’d be absurd to say you own Netflix forever. In the Netflix case it’s be even more difficult to argue since Netflix doesn’t own the IP and the catalogue is ever shifting. I’m afraid the future is rental at least because the consumer is no longer technically prepared to own a…

Meanwhile, pirates sit on the sidelines and laugh

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

#395

Post by account42 »

jjcon wrote: post #371
crazygringo wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Complete refund (or rather whatever it takes to make the customer whole) is what is reasonable for for cases like this where the provider cuts off access. If they have a problem with that, they can implement other solutions that do not cut off access.

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

#396

Post by dtx1 »

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.

How inconvenient. Waiting for a CD/DVD to be delivered, ripping and cracking, saving it to my NAS where it cost even more money in form of storage space vs having a 5$/month vpn a raspberry pi with a harddrive connnected to it and just clicking download for whatever i need, whenever i want. The Idea of netflix and other streaming services is geat, i really like it, it's just the cable-tv-packagification that annoys me.

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

#397

Post by jdbernard »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #353
jdbernard wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government doesn't necessarily have to take an offense stance at all. Just removing the legislative protection for DRM schemes would go as long way. You could make it a condition that companies that want to gain legal defense for their DRM'd content must register a DRM-free version with, for example, the Library of Congress.

I agree with removing DMCA protections for circumventing DRM instead of outlawing or creating legislative disincentives for DRM outright (that would be a can of worms). However, it still doesn't sound like a full solution. Registration of the sort you propose, if done correctly, could work for e-books or movies. But what does that kind of registration look like for server- or cloud-based content (e.g. MMOs, subscript…

I can think of a number of possible solutions (update the DRM-free copy the LoC has as you push patches out, for example).

I think more interesting is the broader principle of withholding legal protection unless the company proactively provides a solution. Trying to mandate behavior by companies seems difficult to achieve politically, and leaves the government with the responsibility of enforcement. The enforcement/compliance work then scales based on the amount of creative material released with DRM. It seems unlikely that a government agency will keep up.

On the other hand, it costs the government nothing to withhold legal protection. Making it the company's responsibility to provide a DRM-free copy (or eventual activation keys, etc., details will vary) to a trusted government entity in order to opt-in to legal protection of their copyright scales 1-to-1. It also aligns the incentives of both sides of the copyright problem. Companies have the full protection of law during the period in which the copyright exists and the public benefits from works entering the public domain automatically. As an added bonus, the government has a central place to invest resources in archival and preservation of the huge swaths of our culture that we're currently in danger of losing. I'm very grateful for the Internet Archive but it is a shame that they have to operate based on volunteer donations. It would be great to have a means to take a means for the companies who created the content to fund is archival (via nominal fees for artifact registration).

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

#398

Post by thaumasiotes »

Gaelan wrote: post #382
thaumasiotes wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't know. All I know is that debts are commonly tiered in this way, and maybe there's a way to do it here.

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

#400

Post by sellyme »

dane-pgp wrote: post #265
0_gravitas wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is also something that im sure many friends of mine are tired of me talking about. "buy/purchase it now!" buttons are far more effective marketing-wise than "license it now!", which is one of the reasons why these companies are going to hang on with all the claws they've got.

Couldn't companies just put "Licence to watch..." in small print above the name of the movie/item and then still say "Buy now!" on the button, because you are buying the licence?

In some countries, absolutely.

In countries with consumer law, no. For example, where I live (Australia), it's absolutely unambiguously illegal to mislead the consumer. It's pretty obvious to everyone that putting "BUY!" in 72pt font and then a tiny "...a limited-time license" somewhere else on the page is misleading, as the word humans use for that is "rent", and therefore it would be false advertising.

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