A strange story emerged in the UK's Sunday Times over the weekend in which, apparently, Bruce Willis was going to take on Apple to fight for his iTunes music collection ownership rights.
The story goes that action star Willis is upset that, upon his eventual death, his considerable iTunes collection could not be transferred to his children.
While it is true that Apple's licensing terms prohibits the transfer of licenses, the story about Willis's will is apparently not true, a statement made by the Willis family later confirmed.
Still, this brings up an interesting issue - do you really own the music you buy from iTunes?
While iTunes allows copies of any music you have "purchased" to be downloaded to you local storage device, with no limitations are to what you can do with the downloaded songs, it is still technically illegal for you to share the songs or to transfer ownership of them to someone else. And when a person dies, the license agreement in immediately terminated, and the completely legal thing to do at that time would be to wipe out any and all copies of said music.
So unlike buying a CD, buying a song on iTunes is more akin to leasing. And you can thank the music industry's piracy paranoid for this particular clause.
And when you die, it appears your iTunes collection will die harder.
(Apologies)
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