After a story appeared in the British tabloid The Daily Mail about Bruce Willis contemplating legal action against Apple so that he could pass on his iTunes music collection to his children, the internet and media was awash with memes and late night show jokes. It turns out that the Die Hard actor has no plans of suing Apple and his wife dismissed rumors when she tweeted, “it’s not a true story.”
It seems Apple’s recent court victory and the continuing patent wars have put a spot light on new technologies and the rules that govern them. As with the Bruce Willis scenario, attention has been brought to the agreement that iTunes users accept when they purchase music from Apple. The tech giant’s content platform has some of the strictest rules in the industry and users can only download the purchased song once and use it only on Apple devices. In essence, Apple is licensing the song to your for personal use and you cannot transfer it in any way.
Now this is a concept that many of us old timers are not used to because when we purchased a CD or a cassette, we physically owned it. We could use it in our car, house or picnic. When it finally came time to head on into the afterlife all our belongings, including music collections on CD, tapes and vinyl could be handed over to our children. With digital music, specifically Apple’s iTune bought songs, this may not be possible.
However this seems to be an area that has no clarity. Online accounts and subscriptions are still a new trend and up until the Bruce Willis story, not many companies had any policies dealing with deceased accounts. Some firms do have policies including Twitter and Facebook. However, the procedures and processing times vary greatly. For example, Facebook will allow friends and family to turn a deceased user’s account into a memorial while Twitter allows them to only close the account and gives no access to the data.
Even though the Bruce Willis story is not true, it has touched upon a subject that will need debate, consensus and probably regulation soon.
Source: TechCrunch
Photo: Geekologie
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