A class action lawsuit against Apple is being made on digital ownership. This sounds like it would be a good thing, but the law feels designed to choke us.
Link to lawsuit brief (towards bottom):
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/apple-must-face-lawsuit-for-telling-consumers-they-can-buy-movies-tv-shows
I think we're all a bit confused here.
@legaleagle
2:25 ah yes, that beautiful pirate flag on the right…
Have you tried.. asking a lawyer? like a crossover youtube thing even?
Well, so the naming is actually what matters legally. So it makes sense that this is what they are going after. There is one good thing that can come out of this. If the store can satisfy the legal definition of "purchase" they can actually have a purchase button. So GOG for example will have a purchase button, but Steam will only have a rent a license button (mainly because they remove games from your account all the time as their agreements with publishers run out). So then of course it comes to the consumers, do they care and do they vote with their money.
I've only bought one movie digitally, and it doesn't have any method of downloading it.. it was just the only one of a dozen formats that I could actually run (and I still had to download and use Chrome for it). Pisses me off but i figure whatever, I paid for it, I can pirate it forever now.
This being uploaded on my birthday…
A surprise to be sure but a welcome one.
Your "keep or lose everything forever" flowchart really reminds me of XKCD 488 (which I'm not linking because youtube hates links).
You should get a hold of LegalEagle.
How’s life treating you Ross?
Someone please explain to me how nonviolence is still an option. I beg you. I desperately want to be wrong.
I recognise that this isn't the point of the video, but may I ask what game is featured in this video? Thanks everyone.
Is that game Book of Demons?
Didn't something similar like this happen during the transition ownership of Duke Nukem?
I remember Atomic Edition being readily available both on Steam, PS3, and Xbox 360 a really long time ago, before Gearbox acquired the rights.
If you bought it back then, you technically could still play it, but only to where you bought and DLed it locally. For example if you bought for the Xbox 360 back in the day, it's locked to only being on that drive, there's no way you could ever re-download it for modern consoles or on a PC account with Microsoft, because Gearbox's World Tour Version took it's place, which is inherently the worst version of DN3D, and it's currently the only "Legal" way to play it.
I mean yeah there's GOG, but hush hush on that.
Back a few years ago, we used to use a program to remove itunes DRM to keep a full copy of the version on your local drive (people may have seen them about under the name WEB-DL, which originally classified only iTunes releases)
For Amazon it used to be as simple as a greasemonkey script utilising customer id, merchant id, show id to download a show via RTMP. But that was patched out during the move from Silverlight to HTML5.
These are both examples from a few years ago as I haven't actively been part of that scene for a while
This issue reminds me of the Sunk Cost Falicy.
I bought something so i should be able to keep it
Not have it eventually taken from me without active consent.
Sounds hairy. Also, Book of Demons is awesome. Glad to see you playing it.
Man, if only Legal Eagle could explain all the legalese for us peons so we can know how dumb this lawsuit is.
You should do a colab episode with LeagleEagle on this!
A man is suing Apple for $25K worth of content that was supposedly deleted when Apple terminated his account for some unspecified terms violation. Adobe is charging high fees to cancel subscriptions.
Why is Ross the only guy talking about this??
There's a factor in this I feel you've perhaps not considered!
I don't use iTunes, but I do use spotify. And the way they do things is you can cache songs, but if you're offline for long enough, your authentication becomes invalidated and you can no longer access your downloaded songs till you've been online again, at least for a moment. I would imagine iTunes would work a similar way. just because your media is "downloaded" doesn't mean it's accessible. This is probably why the lawsuit is vague in its wording. Media you've "bought" has to be accessible in perpetuity. Having it downloaded is useless if it's encrypted and you can't play it.
There is is also the "What happens when this product is removed from the storefront" aspect.
I know for GOG, they have honored purchases in such a way. Fallout 1 and 2 at some point changed publishers, and were removed from GOG. If you had purchased it, you could still download it.
The games are back on GOG now, but they are not exactly the same. Some of the extras are no longer included, and its PC only (previously it included the Mac version too) – But again people who bought it in the past can still download the extras, its just now labeled as "Classic".
As soon as an advancement is made, companies will just sell you limited licenses, which are going to be 100% legal. Just look at MS Office or some Adobe products.
The majority of customers isn't going to give a shit. They want new stuff and rarely care about something old. Having a physical copy of something that still works 20 years later is something not everybody is familiar with, especially the younger audience, which seems to be the primary target audience these days. Kids are just easy to exploit.
We're still just a minority that's easy to ignore and given that there is no almost no hope for change, many voices probably stay silent because of some 'alternate distribution methods'. It's only going to limit the damage, but it seems like the best we can do anyways.
ah man back in the day I actually paid money for Age of Empires Online, it was only like 40$ but man I actually enjoyed it and it only stuck around for maybe a year, and without warning or anything the game just went up and poofed… never got a refund nothing just the game is gone and i'm 40$ poorer because of it and they had big plans for the game, they started off with the greeks and egyptions and had plans of introducing other empires but game flopped so hard and so fast that it never got that far which is a shame, the RTS part of it was fun, the farmville clone part was not
I particularly worry that if they're forced to change the language to something like "purchase access to" or even "rent", they'll use that as justification for even worse practices. After all, if you're just "renting" something, then you should have absolutely 0 expectation for long term access, right?
And this is why I don't buy anything but video games. Because buying games gives me benefits. Movies and Music don't give me anything.
Subscription services are where my money goes if I can help it.
So this is far more shitty than you would expect Ross.
I am not a lawyer but I work in a legal office and over time you can pick up the legal lingo and understand what people mean when they say certain things.
What appears to be the problem is that Apple says you can "Buy" Movies and other media but then also has the right to "revoke your access" to watch that media. The lawsuit does not say Apple needs to remain open forever, just that they should not be able to limit your access to something. It would be like if you bought a game on steam, but then the game was removed off steam so with out your control the game was also forcibly removed from your hard drive and also you have no access to it anymore.
Even after a company loses the rights to a show Apple will still let you download and watch said show if you paid for it. Apple thinks that it should be allowed to revoke that access basically whenever it feels like it. While the class affected by this lawsuit says that Apple does not have the right to revoke access to content if they bought it.
the problem with all these constructions is the famous Zappa quote : they're only in it for the money
While I would agree that actions are more important than words, whenever you tackle the legal aspects of things – words do very much matter. Behind every word, there is a list of legal precedents and implications. The thing is if you buy a "product" it may (and should) have the explicit expiration date clearly defined (based on realistic product qualities and storage/usage requirements) and provided to you. And if the product becomes unusable before the expiration date – you should be eligible for compensation (in the majority of countries this concept works decently well).
With "services/subscriptions", it's a lot more complicated and less consumer-friendly, as service may be canceled at any time and most legal systems have no idea on how to deal with that. A significant part of the problem – is the ability of companies to sell "movie/game subscription services" with a single payment designed to look like a product purchase. I wish this lawsuit would require companies to use strict "product"-based rules whenever they charge for a specific digital copy of movies/games/music and other media with "realistic" expiration dates of products based on actual product qualities.
Class action lawsuits exist solely to make the attorneys money.
A required language change could at least raise awareness of the distinction and of the existence of other options.
shouldnt this be on the dead game news channel?
Only thing I'm fine buying from a digital store are PC games, because even if the store closes, new ones will pick up the slack, and failing that, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.
How can anybody think that piracy is a bad thing? I glad piracy exists in this world! Glory to the piracy!🏴☠️
There are 7 seasons of TNG awaiting to be analyzed Ross. Your first one was __extremely__ entertaining. Just saying!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂
Man, that game is UGLY.
I hope that someday, we will get the good outcome.
Battleborn one of my favorite games is now perma dead because it was online only 🙁
imo – changing "buy" to "gain access" should clear that you're gaining access to something that is owned by someone else. You get to use something but you don't own the thing. It's not renting, it's maybe similar to working somewhere like in production sphere, asking your boss to use an expensive machine or to some files that are classified for you, to complete the task that you want(or have to complete, because it's your job and you're getting paid for it, but that's not the point, i'm only making an analogy), and that machine or file the company has, the company is responsible for, the company owns and decides whether you can use it or not, and if you're allowed to use it, you're still not owning it, you can take that machine or files to your home and sell it to someone. "Buying access" to something lets you use something, just "buying" something lets you use it and own it, being responsible for it, etc.
So if they start saying "buying access", then that would imply that when the thing will stop being availiable, you couldn't use it anymore or any copies of it.(not to say that gaining access is usually only through a service? Lke, you can't get access to a machinefiles if you're not a worker at that factory).
If the service lets you downloading it and keep it, then you're buying it, not just buying access, and that should be a different type of license (idk if it actually is, i'm not a lawyer either), which the selling company should get from the ppl that actually made the product(authors, developers, and such)
Be thankful that they don't sell perpetual licenses for the chair so far. Some day everything will be rented including your clothes.
psst someone tell Ross about the PS CBOMB issue.
From how it sounds, the lawsuit is just pushing Apple to change the "buy" to "rent" or some synonym of "rent" that applies in this case
Physical media is still the best option. Netflix has such poor quality intentionally, I feel I need to adjust my TV antenna. Itunes has untreated coding bugs almost old enough to vote.
You'll still support the people using and abusing talent, but you'll avoid supporting the people one-upping China's labor camps.
Changing the lagnuage can still be beneficial. If you can "buy" a game on GOG for 39.99 but you can only "purchase access" to it on Steam for 39.99, at least some people would prefer to "buy".