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Quote:A recent move by Apple, however, illustrates just how illusory that access is, and how little the company cares when consumers get screwed. Anders G da Silva recently contacted Apple when he discovered multiple movies he had purchased on iTunes were no longer available for him to watch. The company’s response to him is below:
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Here’s a crazy idea. Maybe Da Silva deserves a refund because Apple falsely represented that it had the right to sell a product it actually offered for a very long rental period. I realize that legally, the company undoubtedly crafted its contracts to cover its ass, but this is not solely a legal issue. This is a question of how ownership is perceived culturally, not just legally, and the only bottom line Apple cares about is its own. That’s how one of the most powerful companies on the planet suddenly becomes a meek, shrinking violet at the mercy of titanic forces it can scarcely comprehend. The App Store is a “store front.” No, the App Store is a distribution portal through which billions of dollars flows every single year. The question of whether or not the App Store wields sufficient power to be considered a monopoly is headed to the Supreme Court, and Apple has the unmitigated gall to declare itself a “store front” so it can avoid making a customer whole after revoking access to content he’d paid for.
If you care about actually retaining access to a piece of content, buy it physically. Apple could’ve demanded that its customers retain the right to play works they purchased in perpetuity. It didn’t. And if Apple doesn’t care enough about its customers to ensure they retain access to content they paid full purchase price for, or even enough to refund their money in an event like this, there’s no reason it should see another dime of yours.
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Quote:CNet contacted da Silva and eventually discovered the source of the problem. Anders moved to Canada from Australia roughly nine months ago and he bought the films in question in Australia before he moved. Some of his Australian content still works perfectly, but three films — Cars, Cars 2, and The Grand Budapest Hotel — aren’t in his library. It’s not a question of the films not being for sale, either — all three are still offered in the Canadian and Australian versions of the iTunes Store.
The problem, in this case, is related to movie region lockouts — artificial barriers put in place to prevent film lovers from taking content from one market into other areas. We’ve seen such barriers falling in physical media. Blu-ray has three regions to DVD’s six, and apparently, most Blu-ray discs don’t implement region locking anyway. But it’s been deployed even more widely in digital media of late. Companies like Netflix have begun cracking down more aggressively on customers who use VPNs to view the service from other markets.
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Even if Apple is able to restore da Silva’s ability to access content he legally purchased, the company needs a much better strategy for dealing with situations like this. It doesn’t really change our own conclusions from last week, either. Ultimately, customers don’t care if they lose access to content because a reseller chose to stop selling it or because they moved. What they care about is losing access to content they bought. It doesn’t sound like Apple actually bothered to figure out what went wrong in da Silva’s case until the press got involved, which isn’t a great look here, either.
Obviously, Apple cannot simply tell Disney or any other film distributor how it will or won’t license its content. At the same time, however, Apple is one of just a handful of companies with the potential market power to influence how said content is delivered to the end customer. The App Store isn’t just a storefront and digital distribution companies need to take pains to ensure the chain of ownership is as secure for digital products as it is for physical ones if they want their customers to view a physical and digital purchase as being functionally identical.
