It’s a Christmas miracle! That is, if by miracle, you mean yet another example of the limits of "ownership" in the digital world.
Last Saturday evening, Bill Jackson, a Wisconsin father, sat down to watch a nice Disney film with his two kids, aged two and eight. As they were settling in for a cozy night of “Prep & Landing 2: Naughty vs. Nice,” the elder son discovered that the film that the family had paid $3 for was no longer available.
“My son actually came to me and said: ‘The special isn’t showing,’” Jackson told Ars. “He’s eight years old and I thought he didn’t know what he was doing. But he was right—it was no longer present. I called Amazon and thought it was a glitch. We use a Roku and it wasn’t there either.”
According to Jackson, the customer service representative was nice and apologetic, but the employee explained that Disney had “pulled” the film temporarily as it wanted to make it “exclusive to their own channels.” As compensation, the rep gave Jackson $25 in Amazon credit.
“So what did I buy?” Jackson asked. “[Disney says:] ‘We have a licensing deal that says [we can] pull it back whenever we want.’ I mean, we’re only talking about $3 here, but it was more my kids looking at me and saying what did we spend money on?”“I didn’t really know what to say: ‘It turns out we don’t own it, kids,’” he added. “It’s even weirder, you have to understand. My kids are eight and two, to them this is what television is—it’s stuff that comes over the Internet. That’s what they know of television. They watch Amazon and Netflix and rarely anything else, and to find out that sometimes it goes away because someone decides it goes away, that’s the end of it?”
Ars contacted Disney, which did not immediately respond.
Amazon, however, wrote to Ars and Jackson himself. The company explained that Jackson had been “misinformed” by customer service.
“The problem you experienced was a temporary issue with some of our catalog data and it has been fixed,” Sally Fouts, an Amazon spokesperson, said via e-mail. “If you still have problems, please let us know. Customers should never lose access to their Amazon Instant Video purchases. If they have any issues accessing purchased videos, they should contact customer service.”
Jackson's purchase was restored after his story was covered by Boing Boing and The Guardian.
However, Fouts did not respond to further e-mails from Jackson and Ars. Among other questions, we asked Fouts what exactly Jackson received when he handed over his $3.
Subject to “potential content provider licensing restrictions”
A quick glance at the actual Amazon Instant Video Terms of Use shows that the Amazon customer service representative may have been correct. After all, Disney is showing the film on ABC Television affiliates nationwide Monday evening and early Tuesday morning. Further, the company has the right to “potential content provider licensing restrictions.”
Availability of Purchased Digital Content. Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service, as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions and for other reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming. You may download and store your own copy of Purchased Digital Content on a Compatible Device authorized for such download so that you can view that Purchased Digital Content if it becomes unavailable for further download or streaming from the Service.
According to the film's product page, Amazon customers can stream it “as often as [they] like,” following a purchase and can “download it to a compatible device including Windows PCs (Mac and Linux PCs are not supported).”
Jackson told Ars he does not own a Windows PC, a Kindle, or iPad, which apparently would have also allowed him to download the film.
So what has this whole affair taught Jackson?
“I don’t think you can buy digital content at this time,” he said. “I don’t think it’s possible. There may be a button that says buy now, but that does not exist. It’s a rental. Any promise that it’s going to be there forever, it’s only good as long as the company exists and decides it’s OK.”
It’s also very much turned him off from future purchases of Disney products—and maybe, he says, that might just be a blessing in disguise.
“If you wanted to make a plan that would ensure that customers would never migrate to digital devices, this would be the perfect way of doing it,” he noted. “Disney movies beget Disney toys, which beget trips to Disneyland, and it would be refreshing to cut that off at the base. I’m certainly not going to buy any digital Disney films. But maybe that means I won’t have to buy Disney films for my kids at all.”
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