[rajat]

It does seem obvious that short of having your own copy of something purchased (in this case, a movie), this will happen. Purchasing the right to see a movie, listen to a song, on a service, will never be the same as holding a physical copy. I wonder if it's even legal for Apple to maintain a copy of the movie in iTunes for customers who've already purchased it once they have lost the right to host it. Clearly, most of us don't appreciate the difference between what it meant to purchase something, and what it means today in the digital, subscription world.

So, if you really want to own a movie or a song, buy a physical incarnation of it, or make a digital copy of it.

[danShumway]

It probably shouldn't be called a purchase then.

Consumers understand the distinction between buying a car and leasing a car. Nobody says in common conversation, "I bought Spotify," they say, "I subscribed to Spotify."

It's no accident that companies like Apple lean on terminology like "purchase" instead of "license." Apple knows that the iTunes buy button would be less attractive if it used language that was more transparent. So instead they are capitalizing on that confusion - they want the customer to feel like this is a permanent transaction. They want a movie license to feel the same as the experience of buying a DVD.

If most consumers don't understand the difference, then businesses should use less confusing language within marketing and store interfaces. If they're OK with consumer confusion or if that consumer confusion is actually the point, then they should also be OK with the blowback they get when customers eventually feel misled or betrayed. They have to take the bad with the good.

[thedirt0115]

I think you're right, "license" could sound off-putting. Maybe calling the movie/music things you buy "tickets" or "passes" might make it more understandable? We still use the word "purchase" when we go to a movie theater to watch a movie -- but we purchase tickets, not the movie itself. Or at an amusement park, you buy a day pass or week pass or whatever. Everyone understands these concepts of temporarily getting access to something, it's just different terminology.

[MiddleEndian]

>I think you're right, "license" could sound off-putting.

It should be off-putting. If they want something else they should let people actually purchase drm-free copies.

[paulddraper]

> I think you're right, "license" could sound off-putting.

Reality often sounds off-putting.

That's why we've developed the ability to lie.

[CharlesW]

But also the ability to detect lying. "Lie-sense", if you will.

[paulddraper]

Ha!

[michaelmrose]

Buy sounds like the most attractive verb it seems unlikely that they will stop using it unless its legally not permissible.

I think that a company ought to have to pay for storage of keys required to unlock encumbered media and upon failure to provide said media consumers ought to be able to get the key required to unlock said media emailed to them.

[Spooky23]

It is a purchase -- you have perpetual rights to the content. You don't have perpetual rights to the cloud download. This concept is more noxious with apps, where it's nearly impossible to transfer defunct apps across iOS devices.

The concept is not new. If I buy perpetual rights to software on DVD, I don't have an unlimited period of time to obtain media. If my grandchildren are running a computer with Windows NT4 that I purchased in 1999 in 2100, my estate owns the right to use the software, but Microsoft or its successor has no obligation to provide me with media.

If you care, buy physical media with download codes.

[xienze]

> It is a purchase -- you have perpetual rights to the content. You don't have perpetual rights to the cloud download.

In this context, they're "supposed" to be one in the same. What good is a right to view content if you can't actually get it?

[Spooky23]

No, it’s not. Folks may assume that because they don’t read the terms of sale.

Apple and others do that to simplify user experience, but rights holders ultimately dictate the terms. No movie studio will ever allow perpetual distribution.

In the case of Apple, they offer a simple solution: download it to your computer.

[danShumway]

> Folks may assume that because they don’t read the terms of sale.

And to who's benefit is it that the terms of sale aren't transparent in the purchase process itself? If consumers broadly don't understand what they're buying, then it needs to be communicated better to them.

Companies are OK with consumers misunderstanding the terms of the license when it comes to migrating people off of physical mediums. Then suddenly it becomes a problem when consumers start complaining about those terms.

But there's an easy solution to stop consumers from complaining about this. Content gets removed off of Spotify and Netflix every day, but broadly consumers understand why. They may not be happy about it, but I don't see thinkpieces claiming that the company has done something wrong. This is because Spotify and Netflix are transparent about what they are selling.

The same isn't true for Apple, because Apple hasn't done a good job explaining to customers what its business model is. And I would guess that part of the reason for that is because if Apple was transparent about what their licenses and DRM actually meant, people would be a lot more wary about buying into that business model. It would be a lot easier to see the competitive advantages that physical mediums and DRM/license free purchases held over digital storefronts.

Consumer confusion here is Apple's fault -- not the consumer's.

[lukeschlather]

> No movie studio will ever allow perpetual distribution.

"Buy" on a cloud service like this should mean a license to download the content for the duration of its copyright. The movie studios obviously want to double dip but there's no reason to capitulate on such an unfair arrangement.

[TheCoelacanth]

They assume that because of the misleading use of the term "Purchase".

[ceejayoz]

> What good is a right to view content if you can't actually get it?

The same issue would present itself if I scratched a DVD in my library, right?

[quickben]

I think it's more of a case where the guy that sold you the dvds scratches them all while they are in your storage.

[im3w1l]

It's more of a case of the dvd seller offering a service where they will almost but not quite always replace scratched dvds with new ones free off charge and people becoming reliant on that.

[miracle2k]

More like : You don't want to store the DVD yourself so you tell the seller to keep it and you come pick it up whenever you watch it.

[baddox]

Except that the DVDs would be in the seller’s storage.

[michaelmrose]

If you care just don't pay for things you don't own. I rent access to entertainment with the knowledge that If I cancel my service tomorrow I wont be able to watch it.

I try to only BUY things I can back up for my own use later in an unencumbered format.

[pmiller2]

Actually, most people I know say “I have Spotify,” and there’s where the line blurs. They don’t think about what exactly “having” Spotify means.

[DaiPlusPlus]

Flashbacks to attending secondary school in 1999: “you got the Internet at home then?” “Yes, I have the Internet.”

[abraham_lincoln]

What about "Unlimited Purchases"?

[dvdhnt]

> Purchasing the right to see a movie, listen to a song, on a service, will never be the same as holding a physical copy.

Yeah, that's a no-go, chief.

Even if it's somehow baked into the terms of service, I don't think it's reasonable for the average person to assume the content they are purchasing (not leasing, not renting, not subscribing to, but purchasing) might someday disappear, outside of the service shutting down forever.

As a technical person, I understand that may happen, but in this case, it's surprising. This is more evidence that we are not doing enough to police marketing and legalese.

Someone once told me that with bad contracts, two people can come away with different understandings as to what was greed upon. Good contracts can only be interpreted one way. The same should be true for almost every part of our economy - leases, sales contracts, mortgages, investments, employment agreements, terms of service, etc.

Personally, I believe we need to reign in the "unlimited" data claims, "adjustable" APRs, non-compete agreements, and privacy policies.

[JadeNB]

> Someone once told me that with bad contracts, two people can come away with different understandings as to what was greed upon.

An apropos typo ….

[fastball]

Buying a DVD gives you the right to view that content, but that "right" disappears if you scratch the DVD.

[clear_dg]

Unless you have a private copy, which is allowed in many countries. As long as you keep a backup, you effectively have this "right" for life.

And what if the publishers break into your home and are the ones to scratch the DVD? That reflects better what happened in the article.

[fastball]

You can keep a copy of your iTunes media, it's perfectly legal.

Apple is not the publisher, they are the distributor. They are not "coming into your home and scratching your DVD", an actually analogous analogy would be they stop supporting the DVD format with new disc players they release.

[derefr]

> Purchasing the right to see a movie, listen to a song, on a service, will never be the same as holding a physical copy.

I'm pretty sure you could design a SaaS offering in two parts: one that sells you a digital copy of a thing as a product (rather than a license), for delivery to a digital storage locker; and then, the other, a digital storage locker.

Oddly enough, Apple already has a digital storage locker, called iCloud Music Library. It's where your uploaded songs go when you use iTunes Match and the song doesn't actually match any entry in the Apple Music library.

If iCloud Music Library were properly designed (it's not), your purchased, matched, and uploaded songs would all be available permanently through iCloud Music Library in its capacity as a digital storage locker, whether or not they're still available through Apple Music. The licence-holders wouldn't be able to do anything about this: this isn't Apple broadcasting a song, this is Apple acting as the moral equivalent of bank, offering a safe-deposit box service, where you hold a box into which you've put a USB stick containing the song you bought from them.

Sadly, the synergy between Apple Music and iCloud Music Library is actually exactly the opposite of what anyone would want: when an artist's license agreement with Apple Music expires and their tracks are purged from the system, Apple will actually delete not just your purchased licenses from your iCloud Music Library; and not just the licenses of Apple Music tracks that fingerprint-matched local copies you had; but even your uploaded (!) copies of songs by a given artist that didn't match any Apple Music license, but just happened to have ID3 information corresponding to the artist whose rights were expiring. (In that case, the tracks still appear as entries in the iCloud Music Library list, but they're under a permanent "waiting" status, because their backing storage has been removed. There are many support threads about this issue, none with answers—well, that's what's going on.)

[ksec]

Do you have any idea why this "Digital Locker" features is not implanted worldwide?

The cost of Storage is dropping, Network Bandwidth is cheap for the likes of Apple which has connection to every major ISP worldwide. ( As well as their iPhone agreement with Mobile Carriers )

It was only few months ago I started hating the "streaming" model. When few of my artists's album suddenly disappeared from the listing of Apple Music. I started thinking may be buying them would be better in the first place. Now you are telling me even buying music could also means they would somehow disappeared?

Am I suppose to buy CD Now?

[thaumasiotes]

Amazon used to offer this in their Amazon Music offering, but they recently shut down the ability to store arbitrary files that you uploaded yourself. If you had any self-uploaded files in your library, they were purged.

It's difficult to understand this move from a customer service perspective. Does anyone know what's going on?

[derefr]

Amazon Drive used to offer unlimited file storage. They stopped because people from https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ were uploading their 100TB video library.

Now there's an arbitrary-file storage limit, and while Amazon Drive still offers unlimited photo storage, this proviso exists in the features page:

> If you are a Prime member, in addition to the list above, you can also store unlimited photos at no additional charge. However, the Amazon Photos unlimited photo benefit only applies to files recognized as photos. If a photo is encrypted, and Amazon Drive is unable to identify it as a photo, the file will count toward your storage limit. Videos also count toward your storage limit.

This is because, to get around the imposed limits, the data hoarders attempted to use a storage client that would chunk their large arbitrary files (probably pirated videos and game ISOs) into many smaller files that appeared to be collections of photos. The "photos" created by the chunking client were just arbitrary data with a .jpg extension, so scanning for "is this file of a valid image container format" was enough to thwart them. But, even if the data hoarders tried harder and made a new version of the chunking client which encoded their files as e.g. valid PNGs, 1. that's have really high bandwidth overhead, and 2. it'd still be pretty simple on Amazon's part to use more advanced ML to detect whether a given valid image is actually "a photo", or is just compressed binary data. So the data hoarders stopped while they were ahead.

I would guess that Amazon Music restricted their offering because of the data hoarders as well—unlike with photos, it's impossible to say whether arbitrary binary data constitutes "music" as long as it's stored as a stream in a valid media container file-format. It would have been fairly easy to create a new version of the data hoarders' chunking client that stored its arbitrary files as valid .flac containers. So Amazon just applied a policy solution instead.

[cjmoran]

Do you know whether Google Play Music's upload feature works in the same way?

[daeken]

Google Play Music actually keeps your files, rather than doing any kind of finger printing, as far as I can tell.

[saidajigumi]

I wonder if it's even legal for Apple to maintain a copy of the movie in iTunes for customers who've already purchased it once they have lost the right to host it.

Actually, I'd put this on Apple legal: the contracts should specify that customer purchases can continue be hosted, and served to those customers in perpetuity. It's possible that Apple didn't have the leverage or foresight to negotiate these terms, but the "fix" here is straightforward because it's an issue of contractual terms, not some notion of "legality".

[thedaemon]

I have purchased many movies on Google Play that are no longer available for purchase. They are still available for me to watch.

[Alex3917]

> It does seem obvious that short of having your own copy of something purchased (in this case, a movie), this will happen.

Even if you have your own copy, Apple will still delete your stuff. E.g. iTunes no longer makes an actual backup of the contents of your phone when it tells you it has done so, so when you get a new phone you need to redownload all of your apps from the cloud. Assuming they are still there, which often they are not.

[apostacy]

I don't know why anyone is surprised by this. Apple has a long history of getting touchy-feely with our computers.

I can't count the number of times Apple has burned me. Going back over a decade, with the iTunes 4.01 "upgrade" that only removed the ability to stream my music collection over the internet.

And the countless shenanigans with the app store, like silently deleting old versions of apps. Several times I had regressions introduced and no way to go back. And that is really just the tip of the iceberg.

In particular, Apple completely ruined my iPad 4[1] I can no longer read it in bed because I can't change the light filter. My favorite apps no longer work. And I did NOT want it, but they did it to me anyway.

I really think that we should have a threat model for manufacturer updates. I now have to research exactly what an update does before I install it, because it could very well rob me of functionality that I enjoyed. And the theme of dishonesty by manufacturers is more than enough reason not to trust them.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11986500

[6stringmerc]

Apparently you haven't been following the battle between Redbox and Disney - not even a physical copy can side-step strong DRM via access codes. From what I can see thus far Disney is winning the battle in court.

So, even if you buy a physical incarnation of a copy, you might not actually own the content on the medium. Thanks a lot, Mickey Mouse /s

[tzs]

Are you sure that is an accurate characterization?

From what I've read Redbox is buying Disney "combo packs" that contain a physical DVD or Blu-Ray disc and a printed code that can be used for streaming the movie.

Redbox has been splitting those, renting the disc from its kiosks, and selling the piece of paper containing the printed code.

As far as I can see, it is the codes that are at issue, not the renting of the physical discs.

[xienze]

> So, even if you buy a physical incarnation of a copy, you might not actually own the content on the medium.

Buy it and rip it. Nothing they can do about that.

[ta76567656]

They can if you're Redbox, which is what the parent was talking about. With DRM bullshit they can circumvent the Right of First Sale principle.

[mulmen]

Breaking the law is unethical because the benefits apply only to you. Copyright and truth in advertising law as it is today is not protecting consumers. Rather than being content circumventing the law those of us that understand the problem should work to fix it.

[stale2002]

Bypassing DRM is against the TOS, but is not illegal in general, especially for things like personal use.

I would also like to point out that laws only work when they are enforceable. And a great way of getting rid of a law is for all of society to just break it, and encourage others to break it.

When everyone breaks a law, it becomes harder and harder to enforce, and is an effective measure of eliminating it. If not dejure, then at least by defacto.

[izacus]

Ripping modern DRM protected media is far from trivial and selling our offering any kind of tools or devices that can defeat DRM is illegal.

[JadeNB]

> Buy it and rip it. Nothing they can do about that.

It's illegal (breaking the encryption), so they could theoretically pursue legal remedies.

[xienze]

Yeah, if they knew about it, which they won't unless you're distributing copies. I put laws ripping my own purchased discs for personal use (DMCA) in the "kiss my ass" category.

[jstarfish]

Yep. Nothing is immune from this principle. You buy a book on Amazon, they can take it away. You buy a movie on Apple, they can take it away. Now everybody gets to experience the thrill of a visit from the repo man!

Even Steam isnt immune. With some games they will maintain two copies for past and future customers reflecting a change in license but Rockstar removed a significant portion of the soundtrack to GTA4 for all customers a few months ago.

[wongarsu]

> Purchasing the right to see a movie, [...] will never be the same as holding a physical copy.

If I buy a game on Steam, I can download it in perpetuity. Even if the game is later taken off Steam, I can still download my copy. Technically the contract only gives me a revocable license, but in practise it behaves in every way like a purchase of a physical copy. It reliably does what people expect, and in return everyone uses Steam instead of physical media.

If the media industry doesn't allow this model, I am not sure how they expect digital purchases and streaming to replace physical media and piracy.

[sandov]

>or make a digital copy of it

And do so in a computer you control, not in one controlled by someone else. I'm not talking only about having physical possession of the hardware, but also controlling what instructions that hardware executes. i.e. run free software.

The Amazon 1984[0] case comes to mind, where not running free software meant losing your data.

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...

[xienze]

> So, if you really want to own a movie or a song, buy a physical incarnation of it, or make a digital copy of it.

Highly recommended. I buy disc copies of all my movies and rip them directly to my NAS with no additional transcoding, then serve them up via Plex. All the advantages of digital distribution, none of the drawbacks (the biggest one being "oops, we don't have the rights to that movie anymore").

[lotsofpulp]

The time invested into learning how to setup a NAS, ripping discs, maintaining that infrastructure all seem like drawbacks.

[veridies]

Some of this stuff is pretty easy to do if you're willing to pay. MakeMKV is pretty cheap for just copying the disks, a a NAS can be bought off the shelf, and a cheap computer running Plex or Kodi can be bought off the shelf. The problem is really just that there's no good integrated solution.

[xienze]

Well like a lot of things the best option isn't always the cheapest and easiest. It's worth it depending on what you value.

[nradov]

Doing a lot of extra work just to gain access to entertainment content seems to be kind of missing the point of entertainment in the first place.

[mulmen]

I know how to do all of that but I still do not consider it worth my time. I would rather have the convenience of iTunes without the corporate overreach.

[thaumasiotes]

> I know how to do all of that but I still do not consider it worth my time.

OK...

> I would rather have the convenience of iTunes without the corporate overreach.

Do you know how to do that? Why would it matter if that's what you'd rather have? You don't have it now.