[codetrotter]

> It is not clear how you can transfer purchases, or if that is even possible.

I agree, but there are at least a few clear reasons I can imagine why Apple don’t want this:

1. They don’t want people to resell software that they bought.

2. If you could transfer licenses, a group of many people could share a single license between them, transferring it back and forth. Instead of all of them buying one license each.

3. If licenses could be transferred there would for sure be cases of scammers tricking people to transfer their licenses for paid software to them.

[justinclift]

> They don’t want people to resell software that they bought.

Aren't people legally allowed to do this, regardless of what Apple wants?

[codetrotter]

I used to think so, but it gets difficult with DRMed digital downloads.

For example, I owned a piece of hardware called Akai MPC X. It came with a companion software for the computer, a DAW called “MPC2 Software”.

When I sold the hardware Akai MPC X to someone else, I wanted to transfer the companion software for the computer to them. Akai demanded a ridiculous €100 fee to transfer the license for the software from my user to their user. I had other software on my user as well, so me handing over the user as whole was not an option and therefore only Akai could have helped us transfer the license.

In the end the buyer of the hardware therefore got only the hardware and not the companion software for computer.

That experience soured my opinion of Akai by a lot.

The MPC X is still nice hardware and I kind of want to buy an MPC X again in the future. But it sucks that Akai is like this with the software license.