Post by Willow on Sept 3, 2012 10:44:45 GMT 9.5
Diehard Willis to tackle Apple From: The Sunday Times September 03, 2012 12:00AM
LOS ANGELES: He was the actor who refused to die hard. Now Hollywood star Bruce Willis is preparing to take on technology giant Apple in a battle over who owns his vast collection of digital music when he dies.
The 57-year-old action hero wants to leave the music collection he has downloaded over the years on "many, many iPods" to his daughters Rumer, Scout and Tallulah.
However, as millions of people are discovering, he found that under the terms and conditions he agreed to with Apple's iTunes store, he does not own any of the tracks but has only "borrowed" them under licence, meaning an iPod filled with $60,000 worth of music is effectively worthless.
To get around this, Willis has asked his advisers to set up family trusts to "hold" his downloads.
Willis, who sings with his own blues band and has appeared in a pop video with the British group Gorillaz, is also supporting legal moves in five US states that will give downloaders more rights over their music collections.
At present, Apple can freeze the account of anyone it suspects of sharing tunes with others, even if they are close family. Legally, iTunes users are also banned from transferring any of the music they have paid for to other MP3 players as they could with a CD.
It is not just Apple -- which set such limits 11 years ago under pressure from record companies as the price for distributing their music -- that is facing a growing chorus against such restrictions: a battle is also being waged over digital books.
Amazon has come under fire for abruptly editing or even erasing via an electronic pulse ebooks downloaded on to its Kindle devices, even those long out of copyright.
The problem has become so fraught that David Goldman, a Florida lawyer, has launched software called DapTrust (Digital Asset Protection Trust), which, upon being told its user has died, emails bank codes to designated heirs, or publishes a last set of photographs.
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This is one to watch closely - if we can leave our hard copy CDs and books thne why not our digital copies - I use both Apple iTunes and Kindle so I'll be very interetsed in wher this goes
LOS ANGELES: He was the actor who refused to die hard. Now Hollywood star Bruce Willis is preparing to take on technology giant Apple in a battle over who owns his vast collection of digital music when he dies.
The 57-year-old action hero wants to leave the music collection he has downloaded over the years on "many, many iPods" to his daughters Rumer, Scout and Tallulah.
However, as millions of people are discovering, he found that under the terms and conditions he agreed to with Apple's iTunes store, he does not own any of the tracks but has only "borrowed" them under licence, meaning an iPod filled with $60,000 worth of music is effectively worthless.
To get around this, Willis has asked his advisers to set up family trusts to "hold" his downloads.
Willis, who sings with his own blues band and has appeared in a pop video with the British group Gorillaz, is also supporting legal moves in five US states that will give downloaders more rights over their music collections.
At present, Apple can freeze the account of anyone it suspects of sharing tunes with others, even if they are close family. Legally, iTunes users are also banned from transferring any of the music they have paid for to other MP3 players as they could with a CD.
It is not just Apple -- which set such limits 11 years ago under pressure from record companies as the price for distributing their music -- that is facing a growing chorus against such restrictions: a battle is also being waged over digital books.
Amazon has come under fire for abruptly editing or even erasing via an electronic pulse ebooks downloaded on to its Kindle devices, even those long out of copyright.
The problem has become so fraught that David Goldman, a Florida lawyer, has launched software called DapTrust (Digital Asset Protection Trust), which, upon being told its user has died, emails bank codes to designated heirs, or publishes a last set of photographs.
.
This is one to watch closely - if we can leave our hard copy CDs and books thne why not our digital copies - I use both Apple iTunes and Kindle so I'll be very interetsed in wher this goes