Legally Bound
You know when you go to buy a track on the iTunes store and, without warning, iTunes demands that you again read through many pages of legalise before it’ll deign to serve you. Is that something you’d class as an elegant user experience?
For all the times I’ve confirmed that I’ve “read and understood” these various terms and conditions at best I’ve read it, I don’t think I’ve been confident enough to say I’ve really understood it.
I recently took the Eurostar from London to Paris during which I watched a movie rented from the iTunes store. The journey is usually about 2 hours and 15 minutes – a length so suited to movie watching it would be tragic if they ever spent millions trying to shave another 20 minutes off the trip.
Incidentally the film was Jeunet’s “A Very Long Engagement”, which I’d somehow never seen despite, or perhaps because of, it being pitched as “Amelie… with polio”. I would, however, commend to fans of the First World War Fighting Moustache. Slightly more sex in the movie than I’d like to be seen viewing on a train (those scenes judiciously hidden behind a calendaring application… but really, the train was full of French and this stuff was, I imagine, no more explicit than a typical continental yogurt advert.)
Just over an hour into the movie, as I passed out of the tunnel and into the French countryside it occurred to me that, by watching a UK rental outside of the UK I might possibly have violated one of those Terms and Conditions I may have skimmed though…
10. Territory. The Service is currently available only in the United Kingdom and is not available in any other location. You agree not to use or attempt to use the Service from outside of the available territory, and that iTunes may use technologies to verify your compliance.
Purchases and rentals (as applicable) from the iTunes Store are available to you only in the UK. If you are not in the UK you may not use or attempt to use the service. iTunes may use technologies to verify such compliance.
Given the definition of “Service” seems to covers the purchasing of licences rather than their activation I appear to be in the clear. The point of consumption, rather than of purchase, seems to be something unmediated in this case.
Although, if that action was forbidden by the terms, there’d be no technical way of checking to enforce it. My laptop doesn’t always know where it is, so it wouldn’t be in a position to give me up. I can’t expect to always have a network available, and I’ve no built-in GPS.
But really, we’re not too far away from being able to assume that every computing device we use has some way of determining its location on the surface of the earth. And when that becomes the norm, will disclosure of physical location end up becoming a pre-requisite for any use of licenced content? If my device thinks I’m not in the UK, will it one day refuse to play my UK-purchased media? Will it refuse to play things licensed for home use if it thinks I’m not at home?
Not that that seems reasonable, of course. At least at this point in time. But we already live in a world where content providers dictate the types of physical connectors you may use to watch HD content on external screens. There are already videogames that, despite having no online element, require that players be constantly online while playing the game. Stories of people horribly inconvenienced by the Microsoft media licensing servers. Etc.
Coming up with plausible scenarios in which DRM would a major pain-in-the-ass never stood in the way of its adoption. Perhaps real-time location verification seems inevitable, we’re just waiting for the devices to catch up. (Want to watch Avatar 4? You’ll need to upgrade to a location-sensing player.)
After all, the markets and territories of the content business are defined by physical territories. Unlicensed (“grey”) imports are regarded as losses by territorial licensors, equivalent to piracy. (And no doubt these losses feed into the industry’s total worldwide losses.) Why wouldn’t they demand that widespread availability of a tomorrow’s technology be leveraged to enforce yesterday’s business models? (And, as a bonus, provide additional valuable marketing data.) There are plenty of reasons the region-based licensing of media content works like it does, and not one of those reasons is anything actual consumers give a damn about.
For the determined, I’m sure there’ll be was around it. VPNs can be used, as they are now, to present a different location. Cell phone signal isn’t always available, so offline verification might just rely on GPS. GPS is a weak signal, not impossible to fake. But if you’re planning to perform an act of geofraud everytime you want to watch a movie remember you’re still constrained by the laws of physics – there’s still only so much travel time you can allow between an account registered in LA and one in London.
As it turned out, the reason I was asked to read-and-understand revised iTunes conditions was concerned with this issue. Apple have reserved the right to share your real-time location data with whoever they chose and for whatever purpose (i.e. advertisers, advertising). They then seem to implausibly claim that this isn’t personal data since it’s only the location of the device. Phones aren’t human, right?
I’d blithely agreed to it already, but it seems that it’s caused concern beyond the Jason Bourne-types attempting to stay “off the grid” (hey, what are they going to do? Refuse to agree and forgo the rest of their Chuck season-pass?) Apparently they’ve got the German government concerned.
If I was Apple I’d want to soften the Terms and Conditions anxiety fast becoming associated with their products. I’m sure that most companies will throw up their hands and say they hate this stuff as much as consumers do, that it’s just the cost of doing business in a litigious society, and that they’d never try to hoodwink people into agreeing to things they wouldn’t want to. But surely there’s some way to finesse the experience? I’d suggest
- disclose the new Terms and Conditions a week in advance, instead of ambushing people into reading and accepting them on the spot.
- make the T&Cs available in a structured (e.g. xml) plain text format in which the changes can be clearly determined. i.e. via a “diff”
- and, if you really think your terms are reasonable, maybe pay an independent public/consumer advocacy group with legal knowledge to provide an interpretation of the proposed changes. Then provide links from the form. I’d be less intimidated by n pages of legalese if I knew they’d already been checked over by some EFF-type organisation.
- god, I don’t know… Present it in the form of a Scott McCloud comic or something?
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