from Richard Lutz
Hats off to Bruce Willis for his campaign to take on the big E monoliths as he tries to grab ownership to what he has on his computer and e-hardware.
Don’t understand? Sit tight and listen because it concerns each and everyone one of us (yes, you too) who plug things into your ears or taps things on little handhelds, tablets or your outdated monster cathode ray sized desk tops.
Willis, he of jumping off burning skyscrapers, is mightily upset because he can’t forward on his thousands of downloaded tunes from his Apple device. Apple owns them. It owns a lot of things we download because buried in its terms and conditions (which we all blithely agree to because we want to move to the next page) are little nuggets that say who owns what. If you download Adele or a Mozart sonata, you do not own it. You own it as much as you own a library book, according to experts.
Jess Collen from Forbes magazine writes: Accessing material from the cloud is very convenient, but sometimes it’s very confusing. No longer is it clear, at least not without reading the fine print, whether we own things at all, whether we are licensing or just “borrowing” it for a specific purpose. The Bruce Willis story perhaps inadvertently raised the question of what happens to purchased content, or even our own original content, after we die.’
The Willis family has rubbished claims he is taking Apple to court. But he has made it an issue to contemplate.
Who really owns pictures on Facebook, your private emails, your mega-bytes of info? No one is sure.
And that is because technology is faster than law. It evolves faster. But that doesn’t make it morally right.
Collen continues: How clear are all these rights to consumers? Let me answer a question with a question: when is the last time you read a click-through license agreement? Honestly. Did you read the whole contract to download that free app? Or did you automatically (I’d love to see current statistics on this, which I’ve not been able to find) put a mark in the “yeah, contract, Blah-Blah-Blah” box so you could finish the download and use or enjoy the product? Even IP lawyers have been known to use the “which box do I have to click” technique of acquiring content.’
So think: what you have may not be what you own.
Or a strange message from a social media company that you are not connected to may hide a deeper story. A site may have the right, because you ticked a box, to grab your contact lists and use them (and abuse them) unbeknownst to you. Friends of mine in Birmingham have been linked with family members in California only because they are both in my computer’s address book. Guess how that happened.
Willis may not be throwing the law book at Apple- it seems to be little more than tabloid nonsense. But he has raised some serious points about what we own. And what we unknowingly do not own but have bought.