A recent experience I had was :
1. buy movie on iTunes 2. have kids that can't do long distance drives 3. obtain dvd players for car 4. realized I can't play films that I "bought" on DVD players
It feels like the "Buy" button on iTunes/Apple TV is misleading, and should be renamed to "License to watch on Apple devices". Obvious in hindsight, but this type of DRM severely restricts use cases.
Netflix has the same problem. Downloaded some TV shows for my daughter to watch while we were travelling. Worked fine on the plane, arrived to the hotel, connected to WiFi "This content is not available in your location". Ok, disconnect, don't need wifi. Same message, "This content is not available in your location".
I spent a couple of years travelling around the world, and this is what drove me to piracy. Every time I moved country, the streaming services would change and the show I was watching yesterday is no longer available in this country.
Luckily the torrent sites are available from every country.
I've had movies I've "bought" disappear from the Apple account. I guess they lost the license and I'm supposed to download all purchases and manually copy between devices. I contacted Apple and they offered a free rental as compensation. "Buy" doesn't mean the same on these streaming platforms, its just a longer-term rental.
I left Apple Music over this. My albums would keep quietly disappearing. I spent hours on the phone with their support, and despite their promises, nothing ever changed. I left Apple Music, and then all of their cloud services as well. Today, I'm 100% Apple-free, happily playing MP3s from Bandcamp in my Emacs. :)
Good job, almost the full Stallman! ;)
Stallman would never use an MP3 as it used to be a proprietary format.
> I guess they lost the license and I'm supposed to download all purchases and manually copy between devices.
That actually sounds very much like what you are supposed to do with a owned digital asset.
It says right in the TOS that it's licensed, not sold. Then the button says "Buy". It's intentionally misleading and contradictory.
Fuck the TOS.
When I purchase stuff, I don't wanna read a legal contract. No one wants, no one does.
The contrariam in me thinks: If the contract is that crucial, let's have a mandatory, non skippable, slow scrolling of it, or maybe audio version slowly read.
I bet all TOS would get much simpler and tame!
Whaaat... oh wow that's bleak. I guess Apple do whatever they want.
I’ve had Apple delete my music from my devices.
As in, I had a physical CD I had purchased, ripped to MP3, and loaded onto my iPhone.
iTunes recognised it, linked it to the matching official entry in their music store, they lost the licence and deleted all customer copies including mine.
I don't think it's really that misleading. You're buying a license and I'm hard pressed to think of some other interpretation of that.
That the license kind of sucks and comes with restrictions is the bigger problem than any inherent deception
While I agree with you in spirit... were you expecting that you could... burn the film to a DVD or something?
Of course buying a movie on itunes means you can only watch it on capable devices. You can't play a youtube video on a VHS player either.
You used to be able to buy songs on iTunes and burn them to CD. Why would the expectation for movies be any different?
While I agree it seems obvious you can’t do that, based on how these platforms have limited things for a long time… but that really should be something you can do.
Why can’t I get the file and put it on another device? Why can’t I burn it to a dvd? It makes sense that Apple aren’t required to make more software for random devices, but why can’t I have the file and do what I want with it?
You’re absolutely right. If it was a song from iTunes you bought you sure as hell could burn it on a dvd or cd or whatever. (Right? It’s been a long time.) So if I buy a movie why can’t I archive it on a DVD?
The upcoming financial quarter is a big issue for whomever licenced that content to Apple and to a lesser extant Apple Inc themselves.
honestly given these types of shenanigans from the big platforms, I think buying physical discs is underrated. At least for the classics that you really want to add to your long-term collection
Not at all (hence saying "obvious in hindsight"). Simply pointing out that, at the time, my purchasing decision wasn't influenced by how many use cases it would restrict.
Also, IIRC, there was a period where you could burn Audio CDs from music that you purchased on iTunes.
edit: turns out music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free!
> there was a period where you could burn Audio CDs from music that you purchased on iTunes.
Music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free, so you can definitely burn CDs with them.
Ah very nice. I suppose it makes sense that music is DRM-free but films aren't
I suppose it makes sense that music is DRM-free but films aren't
Why?
It's orders of magnitude more expensive to make a movie than it is to make a track.
yeah exactly
and?
Haven't used iTunes in more than a decade, but it used to have options for converting files to different formats and burning playlists to disks and ripping CDs.
Actually there were some DVD players back in the day that could play digital files burned to DVD or CD, and it was totally possible to burn DVDs that could play normally on most players from video files.
Ah yes, the divx that wasn’t self-destructing discs.
buying a video game at Walmart means you're only able to play it there, it's so obvious:)
Of course b̵u̵y̵i̵n̵g̵ licensing a movie on itunes...