Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Iphone The Courts Apple

Man Sues Apple For Terminating Apple ID With $24K Worth of Content (appleinsider.com) 156

According to a complaint filed on Tuesday, Apple user Matthew Price spent nearly $25,000 on content attached to his Apple ID, which was terminated by the company for unknown reasons. The lawsuit targets a clause in Apple's media services terms and conditions, which states a user with a terminated Apple ID cannot access media content that they've purchased. AppleInsider reports: "Apple's unlawful and unconscionable clause as a prohibited de facto liquidated damages provision which is triggered when Apple suspects its customers have breached its Terms and Conditions," the lawsuit reads. Additionally, the complaint claims that users with Apple devices will find their products "substantially diminished in value" if their Apple IDs are terminated, since they won't be able to access Apple services or purchased content.

According to the complaint, the $25,000 worth of media included apps, in-app purchases, programs and platform extensions, and related services. The plaintiff also alleges that Apple prevents users from accessing unused funds attached to an Apple account. Price, for example, had about $7 in iTunes credit. The lawsuit doesn't specify why Price's account was terminated. However, it does claim that Apple shut down the Apple ID "without notice, explanation, policy or process." It goes on to claim that Apple's conduct -- specifically, the clause and resulting terminations -- are "unfair, unlawful, fraudulent, and illegal," and alleges that Apple is in violation of several consumer regulations in California. The lawsuit is seeking class action status, with a Nationwide Class consisting of people in the U.S. who have had their Apple IDs terminated.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Man Sues Apple For Terminating Apple ID With $24K Worth of Content

Comments Filter:
  • by lessSockMorePuppet ( 6778792 ) on Thursday April 22, 2021 @08:09PM (#61302980) Homepage

    The only people not out to screw you are the pirates.

    • by Gavagai80 ( 1275204 ) on Thursday April 22, 2021 @08:17PM (#61302992) Homepage

      You know your economy is doing well when people have $24,000 to blow on imaginary entertainment pseudoproperty.

      • by sjames ( 1099 ) on Thursday April 22, 2021 @08:37PM (#61303050) Homepage Journal

        It is quite possible to be dysfunctional and, at least for a time, doing well. The dysfunctional will eventually win out, of course.

        Kinda like a newly minted rock superstar with millions in sales, sold out concert tour, and a new habit of using vodka instead of milk on his cereal in the morning to take the edge off of his coke hangover.

      • by phalse phace ( 454635 ) on Thursday April 22, 2021 @08:45PM (#61303064)

        You know your economy is doing well when people have $24,000 to blow on imaginary entertainment pseudoproperty.

        Purchases weren't just for entertainment.

        From the article:

        "According to the complaint, the $25,000 worth of media included apps, in-app purchases, programs and platform extensions, and related services. "

        Maybe the person is a musician. Buying apps and extensions can easily add up. Logic Pro [apple.com] is $200. CyberTuner [apple.com] is $1,400.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by fifirebel ( 137361 )

          CyberTuner [apple.com] is $1,400.

          $1,400 for a tuning app? That's an expensive FFT.

          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Probably worth it to get he Reyburn name for high end piano tuners though. It might not work any better than others but most pianos aren't really much better than a basic Yamaha either.

          • CyberTuner [apple.com] is $1,400.

            $1,400 for a tuning app? That's an expensive FFT.

            I thought the same, until I saw it is a PIANO tuning app.

            Pianos are notoriously the most fucked-up and complex musical instrument to tune. Piano tuner (as in a piano technician) is an actual profession.

            An software that allows a piano owner to do it himself (considering the app does its job well) would be received as having good value, because the alternative is to pay an actual piano tuning professional every now and then.

            • Pianos are notoriously the most fucked-up and complex musical instrument to tune. Piano tuner (as in a piano technician) is an actual profession.

              *pipe organ waves and says hi*

              I've known personally one piano tuner, who serviced my best friend's dad's two pianos. One was firewood, an Acrosonic we kiddies played / practiced on, the other was a Baldwin grand.

              This guy was blind. He used a tuning fork to set A4, and then worked his way up and down doing thirds, fifths, etc, not really listening for just pitch, but for beats. Turns out pianos are "Stretched" -- the lower and higher extremes are sharper by a few cents than the middle.

              Pipe organs are ridi

        • by shadowwynd ( 6310460 ) on Thursday April 22, 2021 @09:48PM (#61303234)
          I work at company that works with children with disabilities. Many of the speech programs used by children who can not talk cost $300 apiece. A nice OCR program for someone who is blind was $100 a couple years ago. It is not difficult at all to rack up $10000 on various specialized apps (disabilities, engineering, sound reinforcement).... not just on entertainment.
          • by narcc ( 412956 )

            Add to that how terrible most accessibility software is ... ugh... Haven't they suffered enough?

            We need more products like NVDA [nvaccess.org] Competitive with the industry leading options, open source, and free.

            • The annoyance is how UI Design on Windows is very Wild West leading to tools like NVDA being hit or miss to a subset of apps. For example, Chrome has completely broken several times where it would just repeat the first letter on a page indefinitely, or believe there was no content at all. Yet on the same build of Chrome, JAWS and Narrator would continue to work fine, albeit in their barely passable state. It remains deeply disappointing that when it comes to screen readers, Apple’s VoiceOver remains s
            • by gmack ( 197796 )

              I wish. 2 years ago I had to fork out more than I'm happy with to buy my father an Ipad and specialty software since he can't speak anymore. I honestly don't see what advantage an iPad has over an Android tablet, or better yet some Linux based touchscreen so I could remotely maintain it.

          • So you're basically paying 300 for a sound board of OS provided text to speech? Holy shit, ppl are retarded if they pay that much
            • Holy shit, ppl are retarded if they pay that much

              Or maybe you're just not disabled and can't see clearly about this topic.

      • by fazig ( 2909523 )
        Could also be a sign of a broken credit card industry, that let's people with pathological spending behaviour rake up huge amounts of dept.

        Personally I'm a bit torn on this particular issue at hand. One part of me feels quite pleased (schadenfreude) seeing that people are realizing how bad walled gardens can be the hard way.
        Otherwise people just don't seem to learn.

        The other part of me thinks that we clearly need some stronger legal framework for things like these, because in the future they're only ge
    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      THIS! Times 1000.

    • Well, the pirates (seafaring or Content-Mafiaing) are.

      The file sharers aren't.
      ("piracy", like you use it, is a term the Content Mafia created, solely to make people link file sharing woth murderous rapist thugs. Ain't that nice of them? ... And you actually went, and *used* it! ... It's literally more offensive than "wetbacks" or even "goatfuckers".)

      But hey, games from file sharing usually had grave bugs fixed, media production software ran faster because of the stripped dongle DRM, and so on.

      And, yes, I f

      • "piracy", like you use it, is a term the Content Mafia created, solely to make people link file sharing woth murderous rapist thugs

        While that is technically correct (the best kind of correct) the use of the word piracy with that meaning predates copyright itself.

        For example, there's this from 1668: "Some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practise to steal Impressions of other mens Copies." And in 1706: "Gentlemen-Booksellers that threatned to Pyrate it, as they call it, viz. reprint it, and sell it for half a Crown."

        And this was during the golden age of real piracy on the high seas. If the industry was picki

    • by petekjohnson ( 986779 ) <petekjohnson@fastmail.fm> on Friday April 23, 2021 @12:39AM (#61303678)

      In July 2020, out of the blue, without any warning, my Apple ID was also locked for unspecified "security reasons." I kept getting redirected to a page on appleid.apple.com to unlock my account by supplying answers to various security questions, but it always ended in failure. Also, some of the time I was asked to supply a recovery key.

      As a result, I lost access to my entire music library, which I had begun collecting digitally in the late 90s when iTunes first came out and ripping and organizing MP3s become common and easy. I ripped hundreds of CDs that I had been buying since about 1992. After the iTunes Music Store launched, I even bought probably $300-$400 worth of music over the next 10-15 years. At some point, I subscribed to iTunes Match so that I could get all my stuff uploaded to the iCloud Music Library, which to me seemed awesome because suddenly my whole music collection was available on my iPhone without having to sync it manually or having to pick and choose the stuff I wanted synced, and also available on multiple devices. Eventually I switched to an Apple Music subscription. All the while, in addition to purchased iTunes Music Store tracks and the stuff on Apple Music that I had added to my library, there was also all of my ripped CDs, as well as a fair amount of content I got elsewhere (downloaded from various places—a lot of it was stuff I would never be able to get again because it was, say, DJ sets that I could no longer get from the original place). All of this was either uploaded or matched into iCloud Music Library, and this worked flawlessly for several years.

      I also lost the ability to use iMessage, all of my App Store purchases were now dead-ended and not updatable, and thanks to the Find My/Activation Lock system, I was not able to sign-out of my Apple ID/iCloud account on my iPhone, and thus I couldn't set it up with a new one, and thus iMessage and the App Store and various other features were just dead to me. I basically had to go to Sprint and report my phone lost/stolen to get a replacement phone ($150 deductible in spite of paying $15 a month for their insurance for years). A little while later, I managed to figure out a way to bypass the Activation Lock (not sure if I discovered some sort of bug/exploit or just an obscure, non-advertised method) and consequently I was able to wipe the phone and theoretically I could get it carrier unlocked and put a new SIM in it and perhaps use it again or possibly sell it, though I haven't tried to do any of that stuff yet.

      I was also using the iCloud Drive (Desktop and Documents) to store all of my data, and also storing all my photos on iCloud, but thankfully all of that was data still also lived on two laptop hard drives so I didn't lose anything. Also, bizarrely, though I had been using iCloud Keychain, somehow all of that data was also preserved on one of the laptops and after I got it setup to use a brand new Apple ID, it picked all of those passwords up again for me.

      Probably for me the most traumatic loss was that of the music library. Yeah yeah yeah, I should have maintained local copies of everything, BUT it was like 400 GB of music in total and my MacBook Pro only has a 128 GB SSD and it was already usually fairly full even without the music. Trying to connect an external drive and pointing iTunes/Music to it and clicking "download" for everything would have taken DAYS (at least) to download everything, and since I was constantly adding new stuff to it, it seemed like it would always be out of date or I would have to maintain that backup version all the time.

      Anyway, I have always been very fastidious about keeping all of the info for any 2-factor authentication schemes I have enabled (recovery keys, backup codes, QR codes, etc), and I even had one labeled "Apple ID recovery key", however it was a 14-character key from an earlier era before Apple implemented their iCloud-based 2-factor authentication system, and at some point whenever they moved to that system, they also moved to 28-char

      • The answer to any self-imposed impossibilities (e.g. hand over your music, cancel your payment etc) should always be "well, see you in court for damages, then".

      • by CoolDiscoRex ( 5227177 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @03:16AM (#61303952) Homepage

        I sued Apple about 9 years ago and won. It was small claims and not a huge victory on the big stage, but they told me that very, very few people fight back, so they get away with what they can, force the troublemakers to go to court, but if they lose it’s money already allocated as a cost of doing business.

        When I won, they promptly paid me and congratulated me. They knew they were in the wrong, but they won’t make it easy most of the time.

        Apple knowingly violates the fuck out of all kinds of laws (Moss Magnuson anyone?), but the average American was never taught how to access the courts, got brainwashed about how there are “too many lawsuits”, and when push comes to shove, usually bends over and take it up the pooper. I’m not even talking about the religious ones who feel honored when (road) Apple fucks them over.

        Good for this guy; I hope he wins. Some iPeople are going to ape fuck themselves that some peasant would sue the messiah though. Hopefully he cordially invites them all to eat shit.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        All of these big internet companies have the same problem. When something goes wrong it's practically impossible to contact a human, and if you do manage to they probably can't help you anyway.

        I've taken to making sure everything is backed up and movable to a difference service if I have to. For example my Gmail is regularly synced with Thunderbird (runs overnight) so I could go to another platform if I needed to. Google is actually quite good for that since you can back everything up with automated tools (

      • First: Do you still use an iPhone? If the answer is yes, you clearly have not learned your lesson.

        Second: 128GB on your laptop? How the fuck is that in any way "Pro"? I've got thumb drives bigger than that.
  • $24K? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bobstreo ( 1320787 )

    I've never bought anything for any of my phones, except maybe a nicer case or replacement USB cable, or new battery.

    I guess this is just a reminder that the content you've "purchased" isn't actually anything more than an expensive collection of things that don't belong to you.

    • by mallyn ( 136041 )
      The only thing I purchased for my smart phone was the recycling fee to get rid of it.
    • I bought an app on the Play Store, once. I was like "Oh, $5 to get rid of ads for life? Seems fair."

      1.5 years later "Your app is discontinued, click here to go to the Play Store and download our updated Appname Plus!" Oh hey, look, it has ads.

      Contact their support "Oh, here's a 6 months subscription to ad free on Appname Plus."

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      No fucking thanks. There are several other apps I would have considered purchasing as well, but clearly the purchases mean nothing. So instead I set u

      • I had that happen with a lot of content on both macOS and iOS when Apple went from 32 bit to 64 bit, and completely dropped 32 bit. A lot of games I paid for are now inaccessible, most of the Chaos Rings saga is one example.

  • What do you expect? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jmc23 ( 2353706 ) on Thursday April 22, 2021 @08:17PM (#61302994) Journal
    When you choose to live in a jail and give up your freedoms? Not surprised and no sympathy. I just hope stuff like this gets people to run away from Apple's sick ecosystem.
    • > Next case

      You can't vacate state law with arbitration clauses if the contract is deemed illegal.

      • by pem ( 1013437 )
        Unfortunately, though, the arbitration clause might be able to sink the ability to have a class action suit.
        • Unfortunately, though, the arbitration clause might be able to sink the ability to have a class action suit.

          It’s likely illusory. TOS’s are customer-hostile, legal nightmares. It comes down to the judge, but there’s a lot of potential escape clauses. Especially if they have one of those “we can change this contract at any time at our sole discretion” things. Contracts are meetings off the minds and you can’t agree to terms you don’t know exist. That’s why Z

  • ... unless you can ordinarily sell them back for whatever you put into it.

    Otherwise they are a sunk cost, they do not add value to anything. Their worth in this sense is whatever additional value those purchases provide to you, which is a subjective amount, and not a monetary one.

    I put a few thousand dollars worth of gasoline into my car each year, that doesn't mean that my car is going up in value by what I sink into it.

    • Apple, Google, Amazon and other content providers give you the ability to download your movies, books, music and software when you purchase them. They are not obligated to keep a coy forever. They do as a courtesy but the expectation is that you keep a copy. Content providers can remove their content from those guys anytime. If Disney decides to remove a movie from any of them and there is proof you downloaded the movie years prior then they are in no way obligated to you. Now he might have a valid bitc
    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      So If I siphon that gas out of your tank tonight you won't have lost anything?

      • by mark-t ( 151149 )
        I'll have lost no more than a single tank of gas. Which is itself less than 5% of what I'd spend in an entire year, to say nothing of how much gasoline I have put in it since purchasing the car.
        • by sjames ( 1099 )

          See you tonight (but you won't see me!) Good to know it's no big deal. I'll try to leave you enough to make it to the gas station.

          • by mark-t ( 151149 )
            My point is that even though he might have sunk $24k into his phone, his actual losses, if any, are probably a thousandth of that.
            • by arbiter1 ( 1204146 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @01:42AM (#61303780)
              If he created a new account it would cost him that much to get everything back that is linked to the account so you claim his loses are less but it could be very justified even if they are digital in app buys. Some might even be able to push for more since its possible some of the content is impossible to obtain anymore.
              • by mark-t ( 151149 )

                All of the content is still available on his old device.

                He spent $24k getting the content, but that content's actual worth is only in whatever added subjective value he received with the content had that he on the device he put it on. Apple letting as person migrate content to another device that they own is ultimately only a courtesy that Apple provides for as long as a person's ID is active, it is not any kind of right associated with software use.

                In tangentially related news from the 1990's, lots o

            • by sjames ( 1099 )

              Just like if I emptied your tank tonight you would have to pay the full cost for a fill-up to get back to where you are now, he would have to spend 24K to get back to where he was after Apple siphoned his phone overnight. You would probably not be amused if I drained your tank you just filled and I left you a dollar as a "full compensation" for your loss. That is, of course, because that dollar will not be enough to replace your loss.

              • by mark-t ( 151149 )
                Em

                ptying my tank actually decreases the usefulness of the car I already own.

                Apple terminating his ID does not remove the apps from his phone. It simply prevents him from transferring those apps to another device.

                As I said elsewhere, Apple provides the ability to move apps across devices using the same ID as a nothing beyond a mere courtesy. It is not something they are obligated to do. In many cases with software, one must ordinarily purchase an entirely new license if they wish to install the softw

                • by sjames ( 1099 )

                  Read page 3-5 of the complaint.

                  • by mark-t ( 151149 )

                    The fallacious reasoning in that complaint is that saying that a thing has value must connote some kind of objectively measurable monetary worth associated with that value.

                    Apple's admission that accounts have value does not imply that the value they may associate with the accounts is necessarily a function of how much content may have been purchased with that account.

                    • by sjames ( 1099 )

                      Nevertheless, Apple states that they have value. They also capriciously destroy that value. That's all that is needed for a suit to have merit.

                      How much value will be part of the court proceedings.

  • by zenlessyank ( 748553 ) on Thursday April 22, 2021 @08:26PM (#61303024)

    For half that. :)

  • Unconscionable (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Thursday April 22, 2021 @08:39PM (#61303054) Homepage

    I agree that Apple's terms are unconscionable and I hope he wins his case (and actually, I hope it gets certified as a class-action.) Because if he loses, not only will it embolden Apple, but it will embolden all the other companies to hold customers purchases for ransom.

    Lovely music library you have there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's pretty dire in the gaming world. Steam does this, Microsoft does this. When they ban an account there is no way to appeal or get your content back, except for Small Claims Court.

  • Two wrongs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stikves ( 127823 ) on Thursday April 22, 2021 @09:18PM (#61303146) Homepage

    Two wrongs don't make a right.

    The user might really have done something unconscionable. And Apple might have every right to disassociate with them.

    On the other hand, they should still be able to access the digital content. Maybe downloads for mp3, or transfer to "movies anywhere" for movies, and a prorated refund for everything else.

    There was the same issue with Microsoft Xbox and Hotmail accounts. You might be a jerk on online matches, and might be banned for life from multiplayer. But that does not mean you should lose access to single player content, nor your email history.

    And having less features on the iDevices? Just sell them and buy a Surface, or any other thing that will work without an online account.

    We should probably set up some legal guidelines for account terminations. Which content will continue to be available? How much refund based on age of purchases? Will there be a grace period? Will there be an outside appeal process?

  • DRM (Score:4, Insightful)

    by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Thursday April 22, 2021 @09:39PM (#61303202)
    I remember a time when nerds were up in arms about DRM and any concept of not owning any shows/movies you buy.

    Yet somehow the industry moved to that whole model anyway and nerds seemed to have just rolled over and accepted it.
    • No, that's just the iFans. Basically they'll argue in favor of anything that apple says. Hell, they'd even eat Tim Cook's shit if he told them to. Or rather, if Tim Cook sold his own shit on eBay, they'd pay top dollar for it and say "this is premium shit..."

    • Depends. I still pay for and download music by album, and avoid subscriptions. Ideally, I buy either CDs or via Bandcamp, and download via that because the files are DRM free, and I can chuck everything into a music repository that can be copied to pretty much any device, be it importing into iTunes, or just rsyncing via SSH to an Android smartphone.

      Movies, if I stream or rent, when I'm done, if I lose access, no big deal. If it is something I want to keep forever, the price of a Blu-Ray or DVD is almost

    • I remember a time when nerds were up in arms about DRM and any concept of not owning any shows/movies you buy.

      Yet somehow the industry moved to that whole model anyway and nerds seemed to have just rolled over and accepted it.

      Actually no, ripping software takes care of any DRM on our irrevocably purchased physical media.

      I still can't get over the fact physical media is actually cheaper than electronic downloads, of vastly superior quality and user experience vs dealing with multiple streaming services.

      • For the most part, I typically buy physical media that includes a digital copy so that I have the convenience of not having to rip. If something like this happens I could rip it in the future. Also Vudu offers a disc to digital service. For a $2 to $5 a copy, I view it as a time saver.
      • This is why I purchase CDs and DVDs. No matter what, I at least have one backup that can't be taken from me without "boots on the ground" or court orders.

  • world judicial system and world government . . .

    You have made the thugs the judges.

    So now face the rusty trombone music, legislators!

  • by Malays2 bowman ( 6656916 ) on Thursday April 22, 2021 @10:29PM (#61303394)

    $25,000 on a software/media collection that can be yanked away at any time on a company's whim? Has the past 25 years taught this guy anything? People losing all access to DRM/cloud dependent media collections when the DRM servers/companies went belly up. Or how does the T-mobile Sidekick fiasco sound? Or WebTV-esque boxes that turned into doorstops in an instant when the service they 100% depended on disappeared?

    Even $1,000 would make my jaw drop. This guy must have a lot of disposable income but he made a very lousy investment.

    • Nothing can be âoeyanked awayâ. Anything on your Mac or iPhone stays there. You lose the ability to download it again.
      • I don't own i-anything but was it even possible for this guy to back anything up? I guess you can connect the iphone to a mac, but what kind of cloud dependent DRM would this media have that would render this moot?

        What about apps? Is it even possible to back those up, with the "walled garden"/prison in play?

        I'm trying to figure out if this guy was lazy when it came to protecting his investment or if he was actually prevented from doing so by Apple.

  • by GumphMaster ( 772693 ) on Friday April 23, 2021 @12:58AM (#61303702)
    At some level Apple's deliberate actions are interfering with a legal licensing contract between the user and the application licensor (which is often not Apple). This seems to fall within the definiton of tortious interference. The plaintiff has to prove that a valid contract existed (the application is linked to the purchasing account and the user accepted the licensor's terms), that the defendant had knowledge of the contract (they brokered the licensing deal), that the defendant acted intentionally and improperly, and that plaintiff was injured by the defendant’s actions. It seems that all except the "improperly" component should be fairly easy if the plaintiff was genuinely injured.
    • At some level Apple's deliberate actions are interfering with a legal licensing contract between the user and the application licensor (which is often not Apple).

      I am not a lawyer but I am pretty sure that Apple is owner/operator/creator of the ecosystem known as iTunes when it comes to apps. As for media, Apple is clearly an authorized distributor. In both cases Apple is known as an agent for the purposes of licensing.

The 11 is for people with the pride of a 10 and the pocketbook of an 8. -- R.B. Greenberg [referring to PDPs?]

Working...