From sales to licensing
Amazon recently opened the Unbox movie service, which allows you to download movies legally. However, this Boing Boing article deconstructs the terms of service, pointing out a number of significant problems.
You see, once you move from "selling" movies to "licensing" movies, you end up in a situation where the consumer no longer has any rights - because he did not buy anything. It's all covered by agreements, and things like the right to give away your copy no longer apply, because you no longer own anything you could give away.
It'll be interesting to see when the first consumer organizations start making noise about this. After all, from the customer's point of view he bought the movie as if he had bought it from any web store, except that he gets it nearly immediately, but from the store's point of view it's not a sale - not even a rental - but a loan under a very specific set of terms, which are not covered by any legislation. And this allows the stores to dictate everything.
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| "Main_blogentry_170906_2" last changed on 17-Sep-2006 14:26:45 EEST by JanneJalkanen. |
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Of course they rent some of the movies as "purchased content". Some of the customers might believe that this would mean that they have purchased the content instead of just renting it.Also, I think they want people just to click the licence through, without reading it.
But let's just wait and see what the US consumer organizations do about this. They sell just to the US (and of course you can't take your movies with you if you travel outside US), and I want to see what the people in US do before they'll sell them here in Finland.
--Pare, 17-Sep-2006
"Here's the rub: because the whole thing is based on licensing and contracts, <i>they can change the rights in any way they want in any way they please</i>. It's not a sale, remember?"
A slight tangent -- isn't this also sort-of true for open-source software and Creative Commons work (like lots of photos on Flickr)? Can the licensor at a later date turn round and change the licence? And if so, does that mean that any software or art containing it may suddenly be liable for X thousand units multiplied by a licence fee?
I've heard of companies preferring to pay to licence software rather than use free open source at all, to get some protection in case that free open source software suddenly requires a paid-for licence -- does that make any sense?
--Hugo, 21-Sep-2006
Well... To put a long story short: no. A later version of the software might change licenses, but a particular version, once released, at that point of time, will keep the license.
For Flickr photos, you can change the license. But that applies from that point onwards. No Open Source License contains a sentence which says that it can be retroactively changed, because that would be a fundamental violation of freedoms. Some non-OSI approved licenses might do this, and GPL says that you can choose to apply a later version of the GPL if you want to, but that's the licensee's choice.
--JanneJalkanen, 21-Sep-2006
Sorry, the explanation is a bit confusing. But no, I don't think it's possible.
--JanneJalkanen, 21-Sep-2006