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Bruce Willis Might Sue Apple Over iTunes

This article is more than 10 years old.

Anthony has the story over here. Bruce Willis is limbering up to sue Apple over their iTunes service. On the grounds that he's built up (and paid for!) a very large music collection which he would like to bequeath to his daughters when he dies.

According to The Sun (UK), Bruce Willis is preparing to sue Apple over the terms and conditions of its iTunes service. The actor has collected a huge music library, and “wants to leave the haul to his daughters Rumer, Scout and Tallulah. But under iTunes’ current terms and conditions, customers essentially only ‘borrow’ tracks rather than owning them outright. So any music library amassed like that would be worthless when the owner dies."

As the wags at The Register have pointed out, it's a strange child that actually wants to inherit their parent's music collection. Another good line is that they'll all be out of copyright by the time he dies given lengthening lifespans.

But this does flag up a larger question about this new digital world. Who actually owns all these things that we're spending our money on? All that cash flowing through iTunes for example: it doesn't actually purchase anything that is assignable. And that's pretty much the definition of private property, that it is assignable. That we can give it or sell it to someone else. Bequeath it even.

We cannot do these things because we have not actually bought these things as property. Rather, we're licensing the right to use them: but that license is exclusive to us. Or possibly to those who have access to our account, or iPod. It isn't just with iTunes either. The same is true of those books on our Kindles. As many found out when Megaupload was dragged down it doesn't apply to digital information in the cloud either: the servers were turned off and access is denied. A violation of property rights if those bits and bytes are in fact yours.

So we're in this strange position that what we think we've paid for is ephemeral: obviously so in the sense that it is digital and not a physical artifact. But also our ownership of it is ephemeral: in fact, for most of these digital goods we're buying we don't own it at all. We have the right to use it but not transfer it, sell it or bequeath it: thus we don't in fact own it.

At the moment this isn't too much of a problem. Very few of us have any significant portion of our wealth tied up in such digital goods. But it's obviously going to be something that looms larger in years to come. And I have a feeling that we're going to need some legal clarification on who really does own what after someone's death. And I have a feeling that that clarification is probably going to come through the tax system. Imagine that some wealthy person had accumulated a very large iTunes collection: at their death would the IRS want to value it as something that should pay inheritance tax? Sure, we'd need to actually have an inheritance tax for this to happen but that will be coming back no doubt. To do so the IRS would have to argue that it was indeed property that the estate owned: which isn't quite what the current license system says about such digital goods.

Quite which way the solution will go I'm not sure: inheritable and taxable or neither? But I would expect that to be where the clarification comes.