I can’t agree that signing an agreement means Apple gets to behave however they want within the confines of the law. A contract should not be something that one hides behind, but something that someone holds up as enshrining a shared, common sense understanding of an agreement.
The fact that an Apple Podcasts user tried to do something that is 1) not unreasonable given other podcasting platforms and 2) not clearly understood to be contractually barred tells me that there is unacceptable deception.
Companies can write all sorts of convoluted (and legally enforceable) contracts but that is not the future we should be striving towards. Having the law on your side does not make it ethical.
If you’re a hobbyist, you might go “oh no, this won’t work out, Overcast users can’t see my podcast” and switch hosting providers.
If you’re going into podcasting as a business, don’t skimp on having a lawyer review the things you’ll be signing up and paying for, and if you skimp on that and get unlucky, expect to be doing the work required to move providers if what you signed up for isn’t satisfactory. It’s really that simple. This service costs this much and has these limitations, that service costs more but doesn’t have those limitations.
So yeah, when you sign a service agreement, expect only exactly what the service offers in the agreement, and if the terms are not satisfactory, go sign with someone else. What is the issue? If I can’t find someone’s podcast in Overcast, I’m simply never going to consider even listening to it. Conversely, some podcasters are actually okay with that and would prefer to pay for cheaper hosting. That’s a valid choice for them to make too, but they are making a choice whether they pay attention to it or not.
Also: just a note, this is only a hosting issue. You can still list your podcast in the iTunes Podcast Directory (or whatever it’s called now) without hosting on Apple’s servers.
> expect only exactly what the service offers in the agreement, and if the terms are not satisfactory, go sign with someone else.
You can't go somewhere else, because going somewhere else means starting over from scratch. That's the whole point of my post: you're locked in. The customer who reached out with this issue has hundreds of episodes and can't reasonably manually reupload them all to another service.
And that sucks for them, but it is also what the service is. It’s a cheap way to funnel people through the Podcasts app and generate more services revenue for Apple; you can’t even really call it a podcast host by any reasonable definition. Spotify’s service is about funneling people through the Spotify app to sell subscriptions and ads. YouTube’s service is basically the same. It’s a legitimate service that they signed up for that if you know what you’re getting into probably isn’t the worst deal.
Total crap though for podcast listeners, and also if you didn’t check out the service before committing to it. Sorry for your prospective customer, hopefully your post helps keep others out of this lobster trap.
On the topic of subscriptions, Spotify does have an open ecosystem where purchasing a subscription through Spotify isn't necessarily purchasing a subscription through Anchor. With Apple, the only subscription you're buying is Apple's subscriptions and other platforms are completely locked out.
If the user is having trouble migrating off Apple's hosting, they'd still have trouble migrating to a different host. Uploading hundreds of episodes and all the corresponding tagging/metadata is a pain no matter what.
> If you’re going into podcasting as a business, don’t skimp on having a lawyer review the things you’ll be signing up and paying for, and if you skimp on that and get unlucky, expect to be doing the work required to move providers if what you signed up for isn’t satisfactory. It’s really that simple.
There’s a comedic version of this in I Think You Should Leave where a party planner hires an impersonator but fails to read the fine print that says the impersonator can hit anyone he wants to.
The issue is that people who get into podcasting don’t know ahead of time that it will become a business. That’s not “skimping” on hiring a lawyer, that’s just going about life as any reasonable person does. I’m sure even Jesus himself wouldn’t have read all of the terms and conditions for every service he used.
The "is-should" gap here is irrelevant. In our ideal worlds Apple "should" not hide the data and protect the audio files with DRM. Apple argues against this position with their business interest in mind.
I disagree. To me the “is-should” gap is the only thing worth talking about. Everything else is just a matter of fact. I’m not a lawyer anyways so I don’t feel like my opinion on what the law is will be very helpful.
Apple is going to do what is best for Apple, and when that is contrary to our interests we should talk about it. Laws of Man are not laws of nature, they are a perpetually shifting body of agreements that in a democracy we have some liberty to adjust.
You don’t need to be a lawyer to have opinions on what the law should be, but if you’re going to propose a legal reform you’re going to come up against the existing values that caused the existing laws to be formed.
Contract law is about one of the oldest forms of law there is and it persists because it is fundamentally two or more parties coming to and being bound by an agreement. It is an age old tale at this point that you basically should know what you are paying for, why you’re paying for it, what you stand to gain and if you have any doubts about the terms of the service you feel unqualified to make a judgment call on, consult someone who lives and breathes this stuff.
Apple offered terms. You accept or reject them or if you can, you renegotiate but you have to have a reason for them to consider renegotiating with you, as they’re not obligated to offer a service under any other terms than the ones they stipulated. So your concerns are really a policy dispute, not a legal one: you want the service Apple offered but not under the terms Apple offered them. How is this not resolved by either you refusing to use the service or them refusing to serve you? Neither one of you is being compelled to offer or make use of a particular podcasting service; and to be fair and I’ve been clear on this point, I think it’s a fair deal between the two parties involved that is also total crap for podcast listeners, but there’s a fair gap between thinking something is total crap and thinking there is a legislative remedy informed by good values that is fair to the service provider considering they could also and would be entirely within their rights to just not offer the service at all like all the years they didn’t offer this exact service beforehand but in which other podcast hosts have continued to exist (and still exist) and offer a like service on their terms.
Yes, contract law is as old as the Garden of Eden but there can also be too much of a good thing. The reality is that each of us enter into contracts all the time that we don’t read. And even if you read it the first time, you’ll get periodic updates to terms and conditions in your inbox. If everyone had to read the terms and conditions each time, society would grind to a halt.
Given that fact, the only reasonable way forward in my view is that contracts do not hide what should be plainly known to other parties in the contract.
> Given that fact, the only reasonable way forward in my view is that contracts do not hide what should be plainly known to other parties in the contract.
Life would be nicer if everyone wrote with clarity, but given that they don’t, we have a special class of people who went through three years of house training to interpret long-ass documents written to disambiguate any possible ambiguities in advance to a standard the parties can agree to; because if you don’t spell everything out exactly, then you might lose if you have to go to court.
The contracts themselves do have to be within the bounds of what’s legal. So for example, you can’t legally sell yourself into slavery because that would come right up against the law and be an illegal contract. Similarly, NDAs don’t pass muster in California because they’re statutorily limited.
So given that you’re probably not going to get rounded up and made into a Human CentiPad for agreeing to the Apple Music TOS or give up your firstborn to use Gmail, I guess you have to prioritize don’t you? When the stakes are “I’ll lose access to this service”, you better figure out what can cause you to lose it if you value the service. A good place to start is to know what is mission critical, like a web host for your podcast if your business is podcasting and an invoice tracker if you do a lot of billing.
So if you’re doing business and you didn’t review the service agreement ahead of time, that is on you. I work in a small business right now with a very small number of people: we review our service agreements ahead of time before we sign them, and even after we’ve reviewed them we have a lawyer on retainer we run them by even if we’re just changing vendors or adding a new vendor because sometimes vendors try to slip things in. That’s what it’s like to do business. There’s a lot of paperwork too, even if the paperwork is virtual and if you take shortcuts, it might work out for you, but you’re exposing yourself to issues down the road if you don’t do your due diligence.
Life’s tough in the aluminum siding business. I don’t know what else to tell you.
Laws supposedly punish anti competitive practices, yet somehow Apple still hasn't been shut down for owning both an OS and an app store (and with their own apps in there too !) on very personal computers...
The fact that an Apple Podcasts user tried to do something that is 1) not unreasonable given other podcasting platforms and 2) not clearly understood to be contractually barred tells me that there is unacceptable deception.
Companies can write all sorts of convoluted (and legally enforceable) contracts but that is not the future we should be striving towards. Having the law on your side does not make it ethical.