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This happened to me with Amazon music. I had purchased multiple MP3 albums over the years that disappeared because Amazon lost the license to sell them so I could not redownload them even though I had purchased them.

I did not realize this could be a thing for books too!!
So I guess we should keep purchasing CDs... although any music you purchase at Apple Music come DRM free and you can copy as a backup for later use.
 
So the businesses and license owners are shooting themselves in the foot again I see...
Arrr, Arrgh, Yarr, Gar!
 
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I agree that digital content you paid for shouldn't be removed without notice or compensation, but I'm afraid that's just the nature of the digital world. That has led me to relying on streamers for movies and music, and almost exclusively using the library for books. I'll buy a physical product if it's something I want to own permanently.
 
If buying is not owning, then pirating is not stealing, if you ask me.

It literally isn’t stealing, and companies gave up trying to have it classified as such a long time ago.

It’s classed as copyright infringement and you’ll be sued in a civil court for it instead of being tried in a criminal court for theft.
 
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The whole concept of "ownership" of digital goods needs to be completely reformed. Even when random deletions like this don't happen, most anything you "buy" in digital form lacks so many of the actual rights of ownership as we customarily know them.

Buy an ebook or a downloaded video game or a movie, and you can't give it away, you can't loan it out, you can't sell it, and you can't bequeath it to your heirs. Hell, move to the wrong part of the world as they've sliced it up, and you may not be able to even access it yourself. It's not property at all, but more of a vassalage to giant IP brokers: you can access the thing you paid for at their pleasure, on their terms. Get locked out of your AppleID (or PlayStation ID, Amazon account etc etc) for any of a host of reasons and you could be out thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars of software and content you've supposedly purchased.

What's needed is some serious reform -- a way to protect and compensate creators, but also grant users the exact rights they'd have if they bought a physical book or disk. I know the whole NFT thing turned into a cluster**** but the core idea of transferrable authentication for access to digital goods is a sound one. I'm sure if the IP and content delivery players involved actually wanted to (or were forced to) they could figure out how to do it.
 
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This is an issue of clicking through the TOS or T's and C's without reading them. Ignorance is not a reason to file a lawsuit.
In other words, if I agree to terms and conditions they don't apply. Yeesh. Lawyers want money. Nothing more, nothing less.
Just because a multi-trillion dollar corporation sneaks a clause allowing them to steal from you into an bunch of garbage deliberately written to not be understandable by humans, that doesn't make it right.
 
What a frivolous lawsuit. Apple literally doesn’t control this and it happens across all platforms. It should be illegal but it’s not. That lawsuit needs to target the root of the problem which is the content owners. If you want to sell digitally it should be law that all purchased content should be accessible.
 
I hope apple loses. I hope others get sued and lose as well. The practice of “renting” content and being led to believe you own it is morally corrupt. There really needs to be a shift. Content should still be available to people to redownload even if it is no longer for sale. There are other issues too, but I don't want to go off on a tangent.

In this day and age where everyone has been trained to use the “cloud”, it is disingenuous for apple (and others) to say download all your content and back it up instead of using all the integrated services we provide and promote. The average consumer probably doesn't even know how to do that, and other users who think they are power users probably can’t figure it out. Also, every-time I get a new device I have to redownload my music library & apps, because iCloud backups doesnt include that content, and people who use iCloud backup will assume they are backing up their stuff.

How many people here actually know how to download all their paid content (music, apps, books, movies, etc) and back it up to an external device and restore it? Of those that said yes without having to think about it or look it up, how many have actually do it when they buy new content? Yeah, I am sure I will get lots of replies saying yes to both since this is macrumors — but I bet even a lot of people here will realize they arent sure. It is safe to assume that probably less than a percent of regular people even know you can. Of those, a small fraction will know how to. Of those, only a small fraction do.

Make them change the app store buttons to say “Rent” and see how that goes over, lol. Burying this information in your agreement that you need a lawyer to explain it to you just doesn't cut it with me.

Yes I believe in personal responsibility and accountability. However, there are limits to what is reasonable, and when an entire generation of content from and entire global industry is literally pulling the wool over everyones eyes, I think that accountability should be on them, not us.
 
If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.
Buying can be owning. You might buy my services for a while.

If the company selling is in effect licensing then this MUST be made VERY clear to the buyer/hiree.
 
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Having gotteon stung a few times with movies and games etc. I am still a bit apprehensive about digital purchases.
It really should not be that way. companies cannot have it both ways; either you rent something or you sell something.
You cannot sell and then revoke the sale. (In particular revoking the sale without giving a refund sounds like stealing..)

I do not want to live in the "you will own nothing future" and I want to fight it.
 
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