Have you been ditching your physical media library for a digital one from a major VOD library and feel reasonably safe in the knowledge those films will always be available? Think again.

Twitter user Anders G. da Silva (drandersgs) has found himself in a few stories today after he tweeted that he lost three digital movies bought on the iTunes Store in Canada. da Silva wrote to Apple to complain about the missing movies, Apple wrote back saying: “the content provider has removed these movies from the Canadian Store. Hence, these movies are not available in the Canada iTunes Store at this time.”

Apple didn’t offer da Silva a refund, instead they reportedly gave him two credits for renting a movie on the iTunes Store. When he told them he was not in the market for rentals, they tried to appease him with two more rental credits.

The case goes to the heart of the issue with digital ownership in that while you seemingly own your digital films, you don’t really own them – you’re only licensing them. A combination of lapsing license agreements and endless Terms of Service contracts mean some titles can just disappear and you’ve no real recourse – a problem that applies to books, films, shows, music and software on multiple services including Amazon and iTunes.

Source: LifeHacker