There you go. This is the typical approach to this topic. Shift blame away from Apple (which is maybe even technically validated by the underpinnings that caused this issue) but ignore the main issue. From BodyBuildPaul's perspective, he purchased a movie from a big, stable company (Apple) and trusted that he would have access to the movie he purchased just like buying the Blu Ray disc and/or downloading the digital file. Apple is so large & stable it's not going under anytime soon so what is there to worry about? Besides, there are tons & tons of threads on here where passionate Apple fans will argue that this very thing CAN'T HAPPEN. One will especially pound the "user error" message every chance he gets. Read all that enough and even the cynical can become a believer.
Trust the cloud with your media storage and this can happen. Possess the media yourself and there are no middlemen wedging themselves in between you and your media collection. What does letting money-hungry strangers in get us anyway?
Very tangibly: I stop by- say- Walmart and buy the Blu Ray version. There is NO scenario that has Walmart or the studio behind the movie or the distribution deal between Walmart and the studio getting redone or canceled or the Studio pulling the movie for some reason or deciding to roll out a special edition of the same movie (making it a technically different version vs. the one I already have), etc... able to come into my home and remove the Blu Ray so I have to buy again if I want to watch that movie again. Very simply: I am unaffected by all the stuff that can happen behind the scenes by media owners, distributors & retailers.
Now the "trust the cloud" version: I don't even "own" the media in the same way- it's called lifetime lease*. Studio reserves the right to pull the video. Distributors can change and the new one wants to get paid if you want to stream a movie they now manage (the new distributor hasn't been paid anything by you, so they even feel justified in seeking fresh payment). Etc. There are for-profit middlemen in there all working every angle to make a new buck. When something like this happens, each player can readily blame the others, giving the customer no solid remedy. There's not enough money in any single incident to involve the courts.
This "the future" mentality to "trust the cloud" is much more to the sellers/owners/distributors/etc benefit than the consumers. I suspect that's mostly why "the cloud" is even this big thing being pushed and pushed and pushed. Yes, it offers a number of tangible benefits but one has to always ask themselves: where's the hook in all this goodness? Worse, who goes the most out of their way to try to sell consumers to "trust the cloud" as "the future"? US consumers.
And what happens when such an event occurs? Some of us will marginalize the negative experience of our fellow consumer as a direct or indirect attempt to shift blame away from one of the (our favorite) for-profit players. We ignore/miss/marginalize the fundamental problem for the party most like us- a fellow consumer- to push what the for-profit corporation wants us to push. Are we paid to do this? NO, we just do it. Why? Because towing the company line is more important to us than empathizing with a real experience of another consumer conceptually just like us.
Bottom line IMO: all this "Trust the cloud" nonsense just sets up this very scenario for those that don't realize how different owning/controlling a digital or disc copy is from only the good-sounding-but-obviously-inferiror lifetime lease*.
This is like asking a woman what's wrong! Holy wall of text batman! Settle down.
I don't think you read my post at all.
I'm not shifting any blame. I'm simply saying that's a different issue. This thread is about media backups. Buying something in itunes leaves that thing in itunes. That's not a backup. So yeah, the rights holder could pull that(and I don't agree with this at all). Backing up would have been if he downloaded it and then stored it on multiple hard drives or even uploaded it to icloud, dropbox, drive, box, etc. There it could not have been touched.
You'll note where I also said I've never purchased a movie from any streaming service and that I store all my content locally.
Last edited: