“In the past there were restrictions to what you could do with media — you could only make a certain number of copies, for example — but there was no really effective way of policing that,” said Colin Gavaghan, professor of digital futures at the University of Bristol Law School. “Now the owner can just directly control what you do with these things.”
Subscription-based streaming services like Netflix and Spotify imply conditional access to libraries whose content can change. (Last year, the singers Beyoncé and Lizzo both edited songs after release to remove a word some listeners found offensive.) But the language used by many popular digital media stores can be misleading about ownership, experts said. Visitors to Amazon’s Kindle store purchase books by clicking the company’s familiar “buy now” button; text throughout the store — including in the description of automatic book updates — even declares that users “own” their books. But Kindle’s terms of use make clear that content on the platform is in fact “licensed, not sold, to you by the content provider.”
Media purchased through Apple’s portals — which use similar ownership language — including books, movies, TV shows, music and video games, “may be removed” or “become unavailable for further download or access” at any time and for unspecified reasons, according to the company’s terms and conditions. And Google Play’s terms of service refer to “certain cases” in which the company “may remove from your device or cease providing you with access to certain content that you have purchased.”
Representatives for Apple did not respond to requests for comment.
“There are streaming services out there where nobody rationally thinks that they own the movies or music they stream, but a lot of this other stuff is sold to people as if they own it,” Schultz said. “If these companies are going to reserve all these rights to remove or change things at any moment, that should be something they tell you right up front in big letters, not the fine print.”
Though most common in e-book publishing, post-purchase edits could be deployed for other kinds of digital media that are stored on a platform that works with content owners, experts said. In recent years, some customers have reported lost access to video content: movies or television shows that vanish after a change in copyright ownership, or that are pulled from stores for outré material, as happened in 2020 with several episodes of “30 Rock” featuring blackface. (In 2021, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit claiming that Amazon’s video store was designed to “deceive, mislead and defraud consumers,” for technical reasons.) But there appear to be few examples of retroactive editing to films or television shows to date.
Gavaghan, the digital futures professor, said he expects the fate of such a case will someday be decided in court.
“I’ve been watching for that for a while,” he said. “Once the capacity is there, it’s only a matter of time.”
