Apple Responds To Claims Over Deleted iTunes Purchases

Recently a tweet regarding Apple and iTunes movie purchases has gone viral, in which a certain Dr. Anders Gonçalves da Silva is claiming that Apple has deleted some movies he purchased via iTunes from his library. This has since resulted in people starting to realize that maybe their purchases aren’t quite as permanent as they had thought it might be.

For those wondering what happened, basically da Silva tweeted that Apple had deleted three movies that he had bought from iTunes. An Apple representative then reached out to him and offered him two movie rental credits in return, which seemed rather unfair, right? However it turns out that there might be more to this than what we see on the surface, according to a report from CNET who did some additional digging.

Basically da Silva bought the movies while living in Australia, and then he later relocated to Canada in which it is a different iTunes region, which means that in some cases, it might be a different library (think of how Netflix’s catalogue ranges from country to country). As CNET points out, there are multiple versions of movies released for different regions. This could be due to trying to cater to a local market, trying to achieve a more family-friendly rating, removing certain political references, and so on.

Apple has hinted as much in their statement to the publication in which they said, “Any movies you’ve already downloaded can be enjoyed at any time and will not be deleted unless you’ve chosen to do so. If you change your country setting, some movies may not be available to re-download from the movie store if the version you purchased isn’t also available in the new country. If needed, you can change your country setting back to your prior country to re-download those movies.”

What this means is that the Australian version of those movies are no longer available since he is now living in Canada, and it is possible that if he were to switch back to his Australian iTunes account, the movies could still be there. However according to da Silva, that seems to be an issue, although he did state that Apple is trying to find a workaround for him.

Filed in Apple >General. Read more about Entertainment, iTunes and Movies.