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.
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.
Why should any of that be any different?
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.
