Bruce Willis Considering Legal Action Against Apple Over iTunes Collection 570
First time accepted submitter oobayly writes "It appears that Bruce 'Die Hard' Willis isn't too impressed that he can't include his iTunes collection in his estate when he dies. According to the article: 'Bruce Willis, the Hollywood actor, is said to be considering legal action against Apple so he can leave his iTunes music collection to his three daughters.' Such a high profile individual complaining about the ability to own your digital music can only be a good thing, right?"
DRM free (Score:5, Informative)
iTunes music is DRM free. He doesn't need to sue to leave it to his daughters.
TV and movies (Score:5, Informative)
iTunes TV shows and movies, however, are locked up with DRM and can't be transferred.
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Informative)
Not having DRM and being licensed for you to do anything you want with it are entirely separate concepts.
Re:Missing information. (Score:3, Informative)
The link is right there in TA:
http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/us/terms.html [apple.com]
However, having quickly scanned through it, I don't immediately see where it states the licenses are non-transferable (it does state that APP licenses are non-transferable, but this is a separate section to the music).
Re:It's not iTunes or Apple, it's RIAA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's Apple Enforcing Their Agreement with the R (Score:3, Informative)
Apple is doing it wrong. On their homepage, at http://www.apple.com/itunes/ there's a link "Buy Music Now." It doesn't say "buy a personal license" or "license music", It says "buy"
Re:It's not iTunes or Apple, it's RIAA (Score:5, Informative)
Also, iTunes has been DRM-free since 2009.
Re:It's not iTunes or Apple, it's RIAA (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Bruce Willis has done no such thing. According to his wife, the story is made up [twitter.com].
If a story sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
Re:It's not iTunes or Apple, it's RIAA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's not iTunes or Apple, it's RIAA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's not iTunes or Apple, it's RIAA (Score:2, Informative)
Furthermore, Apple isn't abusing it's power since it's their store and they can do whatever they want. Fortunately, they fight for consumers.
Re:It's not iTunes or Apple, it's RIAA (Score:3, Informative)
Well you're lying. Having worked tech support for Apple, specifically doing iPod/iPhone and iTunes support, I can assure you that an iPod is designed to not allow you to transfer music off of it. You can use itunes to transfer purchases back to your computer, but only things you have purchased from itunes and only to the computer your ipod/iphone is synced to. In order to transfer music back you need a 3rd party program and what you get is music files with not song info attached so you have to hope that gracenote can find what song it is or you're stuck manually entering all the data on it. The songs file name isn't even correct. I somehow doubt that your 7 year old is able to manage the neccessary steps to do more that the basic sync of purchased music, which is really not neccessary because of the iCloud implementation.
You sync your music back to iTunes and then take it out of the file system. It's UNIX. Having worked at NeXT and Apple in Engineering and Professional Services if you cannot manage to get music back off your iPod then you deserve not to work in the Support Team. Hell, the music information is held in PLIST files. They are straight XML files. If you cannot figure out how to get all the superfluous information that iTunes gathered for you please stop working with audio/video files.
Re:It's not iTunes or Apple, it's RIAA (Score:5, Informative)
See comment below -- even DRM free, it is very time consuming and unfriendly to move MY OWN PURCHASED MUSIC from iTunes to a non-Apple device.
1) Sync the music to your computer.
2) Copy files to another device.
or
1) Use iTunes Cloud
2) Tell it to sync to another device.
What is the difficult part that I am missing?
Amazon DRM free was last gasp attempt (Score:5, Informative)
You do realize that Apple selling DRM free music was a business decision because Amazon was selling DRM free music and had cut into iTunes' sales, right?
Apple had asked the industry to sell DRM free music before Amazon started offering it.
The labels allowed Amazon to sell DRM free first, hoping to break the market dominance that Apple had.
When that failed, they gave up and allowed Apple to sell DRM free music like they wanted to do all along.
Re:The Message (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, actually the message is this story is made up [twitter.com].
Re:It's not iTunes or Apple, it's RIAA (Score:5, Informative)
STORY UPDATE - NOT TRUE. UPDATE OR RETRACT. (Score:5, Informative)
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/03/bruce-willis-itunes-music-library/ [techcrunch.com]
"Update: Like many of our peers, we also fell for this good old British tabloid rumor at first. We have updated the story now that Willis’ wife has denied that this story was true."
Slashdot may want to retract, or update the story.
Re:It's not iTunes or Apple, it's RIAA (Score:3, Informative)
There is no such thing as "Apple's AAC format". AAC is an industry standard format that is licensable. Every single smart phone and most dumb phones support it. AAC was around before the iPod. Apple isn't even one of the creators of the format.