Apple Didn't Delete That Guys iTunes Movies, But What Happened Still Shows The Insanity Of Copyright

from the different-but-still-bad dept

Last week we, like many others, wrote about the story of Anders G da Silva, who had complained on Twitter about how Apple had disappeared three movies he had purchased, and its customer service seemed to do little more than offer him some rental credits. There was lots of discussion about the ridiculousness -- and potential deceptive practices -- of offering a "buy" button if you couldn't actually back up the "purchase" promise.

Some more details are coming out about the situation with da Silva, and some are arguing that everyone got the original story wrong and it was incorrect to blame Apple here. However, looking over the details, what actually happened may be slightly different, but it's still totally messed up. Apple didn't just stop offering the films. What happened was that da Silva moved from Australia to Canada, and apparently then wished to redownload the movies he had purchased. It was that region change that evidently caused the problem. Because copyright holders get ridiculously overprotective of regional licenses, Apple can only offer some content in some regions -- and it warns you that if you move you may not be able to re-download films that you "purchased" in another region (even though it promises you can hang onto anything you've already downloaded).

And, here the situation is slightly more confusing because Apple actually does offer the same three movies -- Cars, Cars 2 and The Grand Budapest Hotel -- in both Australia and Canada, but apparently they may not be the identical "versions" of the film, as they may be slightly altered depending on the region.

And while this may be marginally better than completely removing his "purchased" films, it's still absolutely ridiculous. The CNET article linked above is sympathetic to the idea that Apple has to go to extreme lengths such as these to prevent "region hopping," and says that da Silva is just an "edge case" that "fell into a licensing crack." But, again, that's nonsense. This is digital content that he "purchased" using a "buy" button. It shouldn't matter where he is at some later date. He should still get access to those original files. That's what a purchase means. The fact that this might possibly in some cases mean that (OH MY GOSH!) someone in Canada can access a movie released in Australia when they're actually in Canada, well, uh, that seems like an "edge case" that a movie studio and Apple should deal with, rather than screwing over legitimate purchasers.

But, alas, we're left with yet another example of the insanity driven by excessive copyright, in which copyright holders get so overly focused on the notion of "control" that they feel the need to control absolutely everything -- including making sure that no wayward Canadians might (GASP!) purchase and download a movie meant for Australians. It's this overwhelming, obsessive desire to "control" each and every use that messes with so many people's lives -- including da Silva's -- and makes sure that the public has almost no respect at all for copyright. Give up a little control, and let the edge cases go, and maybe people wouldn't be so quick to condemn copyright for removing their own rights so frequently.

Filed Under: copyright, downloads, drm, itunes, licensing, ownership, regional restrictions
Companies: apple

You Don't Own What You've Bought: Apple Disappears Purchased Movies

from the bad-apple dept

Once again, copyright and the digitization of everything means you no longer "own" what you've "bought." I thought we'd covered all this a decade ago when Kindle owners discovered that, even though they'd "purchased" copies of the ebook of George Orwell's 1984, their books had been memory holed, thanks to Amazon losing a license. After there was an uproar, Amazon changed its system and promised such things would never happen again. You would think that other online stores selling digital items would remember this and design their systems not to do this -- especially some of the largest.

Enter Apple and its infamous iTunes store. On Twitter, Anders G da Silva has posted a thread detailing how three of the movies he "purchased" have now disappeared and how little Apple seems to care about this:

My guess is that with this tweet getting lots and lots of attention, Apple will eventually back down and "fix" the situation. But it shouldn't take going viral for you to not have the stuff you bought disappear thanks to a change in licensing. Indeed, it does seem like Apple telling users that they are "buying" content that might later disappear due to changes in licensing agreements could potentially be a deceptive practice that could lead to FTC or possibly state consumer protection claims:

Last year we had a podcast about a new book by two copyright professors about the "end of ownership" due to excessive copyright usage, and this is just yet another unfortunate example of what has happened when we lock everything up. You don't own what you've bought.

And, yes, it is not endorsing or advocating for piracy to note that this is one of the reasons why people pirate. Content that people pirate doesn't magically disappear when licenses change and giant multinational companies decide to reach into your library and memory hole your purchases. Don't want people to pirate so much? Stop doing this kind of anti-consumer bullshit.

Filed Under: buy button, consumer protection, copyright, deceptive practices, disappearing content, itunes, licenses, movies
Companies: apple

Apple, Arbiters Of Art, Say Game About Surviving The Gaza Strip Isn't A Game, Even Though It Is

from the art-thou-kidding? dept

Search for stories about Apple's App Store in the Techdirt archives and you will quickly notice a theme. That theme is that Apple routinely appoints itself as the arbiter of artistic quality and morality when it comes to content within the app store, particularly gaming content, and that its application of these standards swings like some kind of absurd pendulum. Ban a game over here for telling a bible story that includes violence against children, but allow the actual bible to be sold as well. React to the South Carolina massacre by pulling down games about the Civil War because they include images of the Confederate flag. Reject a wargaming simulation, then approve it, and nobody knows how the company might decide to react tomorrow. You often hear that stability breeds a good ground for business, whereas Apple runs its App Store like some kind of experiment in chaos.

And in order to apply its standards in a way that apparently makes the folks at Apple feel all warm and fuzzy inside, it occasionally has to truly lower its explanations to absurd levels of outright lying. For instance, Apple recently disallowed a game about surviving on the Gaza Strip in its store, claiming it wasn't a game at all, but a news publication, even though the briefest review of the app reveals that it's obviously a game.

A game about the Palestine/Israel conflict, Liyla and The Shadows of War, has proved too political for Apple. The technology giant ordered the developer, Rasheed Abueideh, to remove Liyla from the games section of its iTunes app store, claiming it isn't a game and should sit in the news section.

The real question is, is Liyla and The Shadows of War a game? I played it last night, as Liyla is available from Google Play. It's a short platformer with a powerful message and stunning graphics.

The writer goes on from there to describe the plot, the inclusion of reactions to real life events, the graphical elements of the game, and the, well, gameplay. Because it's a game. You have to play to get either a win or lose scenario, there are choices to be made, puzzles to be solved, and stages to complete. It's a platformer, like Mario Bros..

So, why the ban and the lies to support it? Well, one can understand that the Middle East conflict and the ongoing crisis between the Palestinians and the Israelis is among the most touchy of subjects. For a company that wants to keep its brand and its App Store squeaky clean, at least in its own mind, one can imagine that this kind of thing is something Apple wouldn't want to touch. But, misguided as this already is, it becomes all the more so when it can't even bother to stay consistent on the matter. The App Store has available for purchase, for instance, Israeli Heroes, which appears to be an Angry Birds clone in which you lob missiles at bombs that reside under a crescent moon and oh my god, I think I'm about to have an embolism, because come on.

As always, in the midst of this nonsense, the game is available for Android devices, because that garden has no wall around it.

For once, the phrase 'relax, it's just a game' seems apt. Apple take note. Liyla and The Shadows of War is available for Android on Google Play – it's free, it's short and it's definitely a game worth playing.

We've said it before, but we'll say it again: it'd be best if Apple would get out of the art critique business. They're not very good at it.

Filed Under: app store, censorship, games, gaza strip, itunes, video games, walled garden
Companies: apple

Apple Rejects Game Based On Bible Story Due To Content Including Violence Against Children

from the oh-god dept

Apple has a long and annoying history of trying to keep the content within its app store as pure as the driven snow. To do this, Apple employs an arbitrary and downright stupid sense of morality. That's how you end up with Apple banning a VR representation of the Ferguson shooting, for instance, despite the fact that it was non-graphic. Or that time the company killed off a Civil War simulation because the game contained historically accurate representations of the Confederate flag. Or when it removed an image-searching app from the store because, hey, somebody somewhere might use it to see naughty-bits.

But to really see Apple's morality turned on its head, we can now point to its rejection of a mobile version of the popular game The Binding of Isaac because it contains violence towards children. And, on the face of it, you can see Apple's point. The game, after all, does indeed have some themes that would normally raise eyebrows over at Apple.

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth's console and platform editions are rated M by the ESRB. Promotional images for The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth have frequently shown cartoon representations of children, including the protagonist, naked and weeping, curled up on the floor in a dungeon, or otherwise mistreated.

The game itself is a procedurally generated dungeon crawler that does feature violence, but only in the sense of basic gameplay where combat is an option. Some of the dungeon's inhabitants are deformed, but again, they're rendered in a stylized, cartoonish way.

The reason the player is crawling through those dungeons is because the mother in the story is attempting to capture him and sacrifice him as an offering to the God she is hearing in her head. And, if that particular bit sounds incredibly familiar to you, it's because it's a variance on the age-old biblical story on which the game is based.

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is inspired by the Old Testament story of Isaac, the son of Abraham, whom God had asked to sacrifice on Mount Moriah. He is stopped at the last moment by an angel. Interpretations of it among the Abrahamic faiths vary but it is, broadly speaking, a test-of-faith story that in the United States has been taught in Sunday school for decades.

Truth be told, it's a horrible story that I'm not and never was particularly fond of, even when I was in Sunday School. Still, Apple's rejection of the app on the grounds that it contains "violence against children" would be on much more solid ground if the god damn source material, known as the various iterations of the Bible, didn't have an entire section on Apple's book store dedicated to it. Anyone really want to suggest that those holy books don't also contain violence against children?

The point, of course, isn't that Apple should also take down the bible from the app store. That would be stupid. As stupid as, say, Apple's arbitrary application of Apple Morality in a way that is equally ham-fisted and incoherent. It would be better if Apple tempted fate by taking down Eden's walls to let the public apply its own morality, whatever serpents might be found in wait.

Filed Under: app store, bible story, binding of isaac, itunes, morality, morality police, the bible
Companies: apple

U2 Still Insists No Value In 'Free' Music, Despite Making Millions From It

from the it's-all-part-of-a-business-model dept

As you may have heard, earlier this week Apple announced a bunch of things -- and that included that U2 was releasing a surprise new album that everyone who uses iTunes would magically get automatically for free in their library. That struck some people as interesting, given that the band has long crusaded angrily against "free." Four years ago, we wrote about how Paul McGuinness, the band's long-time manager, was railing against "free." Here's what he said at the time:

If you had to encapsulate the crisis of the music industry in the past decade, it would be in one momentous word: "free." The digital revolution essentially made music free. It is now doing the same with films and books. For years we (and by "we" I mean the music business, musicians, creative industries, governments and regulators) have grappled with this new concept of "free." One minute we have fought it like a monster, the next we have embraced it like a friend. As consumers, we have come to love "free" - but as creators, seeking reward for our work, it has become our worst nightmare. In recent years the music business has tried to "fight free with free," seeking revenues from advertising, merchandising, sponsorship - anything, in fact, other than the consumer's wallet. These efforts have achieved little success. Today, "free" is still the creative industries' biggest problem.

Bono has repeatedly attacked the idea of free music, complaining that it's "madness."

Music has become tap water, a utility, where for me it's a sacred thing, so I'm a little offended."

Funny, it seems even more ubiquitous under this deal.

Of course, the other side will argue, this is different. This is "okay" because they got paid upfront. Bono himself still seems offended by the concept of free, but insists this doesn't count because it's not really free:

“We were paid,” Bono tells TIME. “I don’t believe in free music. Music is a sacrament.”

Yup. Of course. Bono repeated a similar story to the NY Times, and current manager, Guy Oseary, says more or less the same thing:

Bono, U2’s lead singer, alluded to the deal himself at Apple’s event. After the band performed, he and Mr. Cook playfully negotiated over how the album could be released through iTunes “in five seconds.” Mr. Cook said it could if the album was given away free.

“But first you would have to pay for it,” Bono said, “because we’re not going in for the free music around here.”

Mr. Oseary, who took over management of the band less than a year ago, stressed in a phone interview after the event that the music still had value even though it was being given away.

“This is a gift from Apple to their customers,” Mr. Oseary said. “They bought it and they are giving it away.”

But, as per usual, this (once again) misunderstands the nature of "free." For years we've tried to hit back on this notion. As we've said free is not the business model, but free should be a key part of the business model, with the idea being that "free" helps the artists make more money. And that's exactly what's happened here. Now, of course, because of U2's stature and Apple's billions in cash, this could be done as a big upfront deal (rumors are saying that Apple will pay somewhere around $100 million total). But for others it may involve giving away stuff free to build a larger audience for shows. Or maybe it involves getting money upfront via a crowdfunding campaign and then sharing the music widely. Or maybe it involves using a tool like Patreon to get people to pay for each new track released, but still making them more widely available for free.

The point is that "free" is not some evil. It's something that the public really appreciates, and when done right fits very nicely in with a smart business model. For U2 that's collecting millions in cash from Apple. For others, it's other things. Free is not evil. It's a tool, and one that can be used to make people lots of money -- as U2 and Bono are realizing, even if they don't "realize" it. Amusingly, since these tracks are automatically showing up in everyone's iTunes, some are actually arguing that it becomes the equivalent of junk mail. In other words, there's an argument to be made that this promotion which effectively pushes "free" tracks even to people who don't want them does a lot more to decrease the value of the music than any sort of unauthorized files sharing. At least with file sharing, people get the free music because they want and value it.

In the end, though, I tend to agree with Amanda Palmer's take that everyone should be doing all kinds of business model experiments, so I certainly have no problem with this particular one. In fact, I think it's great.

It would just be nice if U2 and its managers could admit that maybe "free" isn't automatically evil.

Filed Under: bono, business models, free, free music, give away, guy oseary, itunes, music, paul mcguinness, u2
Companies: apple

Apple Pulls Popular Weed-Growing Game From App Store, Ignores All The Unpopular Ones

from the consistent-inconsistency dept

It should be clear by now that Apple sees most of us as the proverbial unwashed masses and is on something of a mission to immolate immoral thought patterns by trying to put everyone's head in the collective sand. That seems to be the only explanation for their app store censoring process, which has in the past removed historical context from games, the human body from consideration, comic books it deems to be immoral, and literature. All, mind you, in the name of a corporate moral code that probably wouldn't hold up under closer scrutiny.

But even if Apple wants to play the morality card, it presents the problem of consistency. Moral stances, after all, don't allow for picking and choosing due to outside factors. Yet that appears to be exactly what is occurring with the latest app store nixing of a popular game about growing marijuana, called Weed Firm.

As you might have noticed the game is no longer available on the Apple App Store. This was entirely Apple's decision, not ours. We guess the problem was that the game was just too good and got to number one in All Categories, since there are certainly a great number of weed based apps still available, as well as games promoting other so-called 'illegal activities' such as shooting people, crashing cars and throwing birds at buildings...If we let hypocrites determine what content is suitable for us we will soon all be watching teletubbies instead of Breaking Bad and playing... oh I don't know… nothing good comes to mind, without some form of 'illegal activity' or other really.

A couple of things to note. First, for those of us that are older than, say, fifteen, the rapid decriminalization of all things marijuana in this country is on a pace that can be described as no less than staggering. If you simply chart out what's gone on over the past decade and extrapolate into the next, it isn't off base to expect marijuana to go the way of tobacco and alcohol within that time. So the morality play is on shaky ground to begin with. Add to that, as Kotaku does, that the only thing consistent about Apple's app removal standards is its astounding inconsistency, and we should probably all begin asking ourselves exactly what the point of any of this is.

You can find places to buy weed on the app store. You can rate different strains of weed. You can download apps that teach you more about marijuana, or get apps that will give you various cosmetic weed changes to your phone. You can even roll fake joints. You can't, however, download a game where you grow marijuana. Other games, such as Weed Farmer and Weed Tycoon, remain active on the app store for now—but these games weren't as popular or as well-rated as Weed Firm was.

What, on the face of it, might have appeared to be a genuine, if misplaced, attempt to apply some kind of moral code suddenly dissolves into a PR response. As long as the marijuana-related games are generating money without being popular enough to draw any kind of wider attention, Apple's moral qualms go by the wayside. They either don't have the interest or the actual capacity to actively police all such offending games. Either answer renders the morality play moot to begin with: either you can enforce your strict guidelines in general or you can't. Apple, in the case of games revolving around marijuana, clearly can't. So what are we all doing here?

Well, we're suffering under Apple's delusion that we're children, of course. Children in need of a firm hand and the guidance of our parents, which apparently somehow became Apple. I suppose it isn't all that different from the old AOL walled-internet days, which I happily note went the hell away over a decade ago when the internet and its average denizen grew up. Maybe it's time now for Apple to stop it with the whole Puritan routine and start trusting their customers a bit more?

Filed Under: app store, apps, arbitrary, drugs, gatekeeper, itunes, morality, weed
Companies: apple

Apple Rejects Tank Battle 1942, Then Approves; Shows How Stupid The iOS Approval Process Is

from the frenemies dept

It's not much of a secret that Apple sees itself as some kind of supreme overlord of apps for its iProducts. And that supreme overlord has some very puritanical views, it seems: no nudity, no literature, and no immoral comics (censorship claims based solely on Apple's pure-as-the-driven-snow morality indexer). Far be it from a silly little human like myself to question whether our overlords' iron-grip is good for the app ecosystem, but with all the questionable decisions that seemed to be made in the name of the app approval process, perhaps it's time for a more democratized solution, like letting customers decide whether they want something or not.

I say that because when we've reached the point that a World War 2 strategy game is initially rejected for app store inclusion for the sin of having Nazi enemies in the game, we've reached an absurdity level typically reserved for Monty Python sketches.

Hunted Cow Studios chief Andrew Mullholland just sent me screenshots of the status of Tank Battle: East Front 1942, the followup to the WWII wargame we just reviewed last week. Apple has rejected the game for having Germans and Russians in it. I’m not kidding.

We found that your app contains content or features that include people from a specific race, culture, government, corporation, or other real entity as the enemies in the context of the game, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines. Specifically, we noticed your app depicts real entity as the enemies.

Apple...come on. They're Nazis. Somewhere between playing war as children, playing video games, watching movies, or pretending they're Indiana Jones, roughly every damned person on the planet has either pretend-killed a Nazi or watched a Nazi getting pretend-killed. That's what Nazis are for. You want a little mildly violent entertainment, but you need a fall-guy to shoot at so your friends and family won't think you're a jerk...boom, Nazis! This initial rejection was all the more silly since the game is set in a historical period when half the world was at war with, you guessed it, the Nazis!

Now, because not everyone at Apple is a lobotomized monkey that's been dipping into Steve Jobs' left-behind liquor cabinet, the decision to reject the game was quickly reversed.

Andrew Mulholland just wrote in to say that Apple re-reviewed the game and have reversed their decision without Hunted Cow Studios having to make any changes. Common sense prevails. Tank Battle: East Front 1942 will be on the App Store tonight at midnight.

Nonsense. In what world is it common sense prevailing for this to have ever happened to begin with? The whole censorious process is an amalgam of frustrated confusion, created only because Apple wants to play parent rather than letting their child of an app store go free and grow up. We're talking about an entire situation that never need have happened, and we're calling it a win for common sense?

Filed Under: app store, approvals, arbitrary, ios, itunes, tank battle 1942, walled gardens
Companies: apple

Unexpected Things: Guy Capitalizing On The Concept Of Music SEO By Recording 100 Songs A Day

from the this-modern-world dept

There's an incredible story that recently played on On the Media's awesome off-shoot TLDR podcast, talking about a guy who basically spends all of his free time writing and recording songs on pretty much every topic imaginable, and then uploading them to Spotify and iTunes, just in case someone is magically looking for a song about any particular topic. He's already recorded 14,000 songs, and says last year he made about $23,000 from royalties. Many of the songs seem quirky, and I'm not sure many people would consider them to be any good, but that's not really the point. The point is to have some music on pretty much any topic.

The more I thought about this, I realized this is yet another unique outcome of the modern digital era. In our Sky is Rising report from a few years ago, one of things we noted was the massive explosion in books (mostly ebooks), but we carefully noted that many of them were these odd automated productions, pulling feeds of information and releasing them in book form. That kind of thing is designed to be created cheaply and never sell many copies, but still might be incredibly useful for the 2 or 3 people who need exactly what's in that book. If you can produce enough things like that, perhaps it's worthwhile.

And, with digital music becoming so common, it's not such a crazy idea to basically try to thrive on search engine optimizing (SEO'ing) music searches. I say this as someone who has created Spotify playlists about trains, bananas and (just last week) "the ABCs" for my son. As I was setting those up, I thought about just how incredibly different the world my son will grow up in is than what everyone else has experienced. When he says, "I want to hear songs about trains!" it's actually not that difficult to do exactly that. This goes beyond just what many people thought the rise of digital music would bring about, which is the breakdown of the need for "albums" as people move to singles, but the opportunity to create songs on a theme or topic for those people who are looking for it. There may not be that many people actually searching for any such particular song, but if you can make enough of them, covering enough topics that when someone needs just any song on a particular topic, there's now an opportunity to do that.

This isn't "the future of music" or anything of that sort. It's just one of those wonderful, tangential things enabled by our digital world, filling a need that is actually quite useful for some, in a way that really wasn't possible not too long ago.

Filed Under: itunes, music, new things, search, seo, songwriting, tldr
Companies: spotify

Digital Music News Explains To Apple What Fair Use Is, Reposts Contract That Apple Tried To DMCA Away

from the do-you-want-to-litigate? dept

Back in October, we wrote about the ridiculous decision by Apple to make a questionable copyright claim on a copy of its iTunes Radio contract, that had been posted to Scribd by the site Digital Music News, for the purpose of analyzing and discussing the contract. As we pointed out at the time, it was difficult to see how this was a legitimate DMCA takedown. The publication was in the public interest and was used for discussion, commentary and critique. The copyright on the contract, whatever might exist, would be very thin. And, of course, there's no "market" for the contract itself, so posting it wouldn't undermine the market at all.

Paul Levy of Public Citizen, representing Digital Music News (disclaimer: Levy has represented us on a few occasions in the past, and I introduced Levy to DMN over a different matter a while back), has now sent Apple a letter, explaining the basics of fair use and why Apple is wrong to issue a bogus takedown.

Apple should know better. Although Apple may not have been pleased by DMN's coverage, the solution was not to suppress the information that DMN had provided. Certainly, the contract includes sufficient original expression to be copyrighted, but the posting was plainly fair use. The contract was posted for reasons of newsworthiness, a transformative and essentially non-commercial use. The posting of the contract in now way interfered with the market for the document, which is not sold, after all. Indeed, the purpose of the takedown was not to protect legitimate copyright interests, but to suppress criticism, which could well be deemed copyright misuse. In issuing the DMCA takedown, Apple was required to consider the fair use reasons for the posting, and the filing of the notice implicitly represented that the posting was not fair use. Consequently, we believe that the takedown was wrongful.

Of course, rather than directly challenging the takedown, DMN has decided to take a different path. Rather than posting the contract to Scribd, it has placed it directly on its own server and written a new article about it (comparing it to Pandora's contract terms -- and, actually, Apple comes out rather favorably in comparison). Levy suggests to Apple's lawyers that they might want to think carefully before trying to issue another DMCA notice about that contract.

We are, however, focused on the future. Today, DMN has published a new story entitled Who's Screwing You Worse: iTunes Radio, or Pandora... and it has included links to the contract which is now hosted on its own server.... In the event Apple serves a DMCA notice on DMN, or on its upstream provider, or if Apple takes any other action against the availability of the contract, we will assume that Apple has decided to litigate the fair use issue. We will be ready to accommodate such a choice.

Your move, Apple.

Filed Under: contracts, copyright, fair use, itunes, itunes radio
Companies: apple, digital music news

Apple Makes Questionable Copyright Claim To Pull Down iTunes Contract

from the shameful dept

There had been some buzz a while back when Digital Music News published an entire iTunes Radio contract, which was targeted at smaller indie labels, showing how Apple got to throw its weight around, presenting terms that were very much in Apple's favor over the labels if they wanted to participate in iTunes Radio. However, while it took a few months, Apple's lawyers finally spotted this and they have apparently made a copyright claim to get the contract taken down. I wonder how the small group of indie musicians who always fight for stronger copyrights feel about Apple using copyright to take down rather important information that they should know concerning the sort of deal Apple offers them....

While this may be possibly legal under the law, it demonstrates how the law can be used in ways that really have absolutely nothing to do with copyright's purpose. Apple didn't need copyright's incentives to create this contract. There is no market for the contract itself. The purpose in flexing the copyright claim here is one thing and one thing only: censorship. As law professor Eric Goldman explained:

"It's not out of legal bounds to do this. It's just kind of a jerk move. We all know what's happening here. Apple doesn't care about protecting the copyright of contracts. It's using copyright to try and suppress information that it doesn't want made public."

That said, I question whether or not this really is a legit takedown. While Apple can claim a copyright on the contract, it seems that DMN has a really strong fair use claim. The purpose was for reporting (a key purpose that supports fair use). The publication was in the public interest. The type of work is a "contract" for which copyright tends to mean very little. Finally, there's no "market" for the contract itself, and thus the impact on the market or the value of the copyright in the item is nothing. The only factor that weighs against it is the fact that the entire contract was used -- but as we've pointed out many times in the past, plenty of cases have been deemed fair use where the "entire work" has been used. This seems like a perfectly strong fair use case, though it might not be worth the legal cost to fight Apple over this, given the company's historical willingness to go absolutely bonkers against publications it doesn't like.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, fair use, itunes, itunes contract
Companies: apple, digital music news