Apple is reportedly making customers wait a calendar year before they can add family members to the "Family Account" service that lets users share iTunes and iCloud media with up to six people.
The family sharing feature launched on Thursday, but many customers have been unable to share media among family members due to a restrictive measure from Apple intended to curb digital pirating, VentureBeat reported.
The issue kicks in when users restart their Family Sharing accounts and try to add members back.
"Anyone who removed family members from their Apple Family Sharing account, turned off the sharing feature, and restarted the setup process found that they were unable to re-add those family members for a calendar year," VentureBeat's Tom Cheredar explained.
Apple allows customers to use Family Sharing twice a year, so once people have been added as "family members" twice, they're out for another 364 days.
VentureBeat noted that the measure doesn't just protect copyrighted material. Families who want to share their own photos and videos taken from an iOS device will also run into problems if members are restricted from sharing for a year.
On Wednesday, Amazon launched a similar feature called Family Library that lets users share digital books, audiobooks, apps, movies and TV shows, the New York Times' Bits blog reported.
Digital media is still catching up with physical copies of books, CDs and DVDs since loaning digital versions continues to be much more difficult.
"[Family sharing] presupposes that the content owners should be able to have that kind of control over what they buy," Corynne McSherry, lead intellectual property policy researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Bits. "Copyright law isn't changing with our times, because what doesn't change is that people want to be able to give someone a copy of a book or song that they legally bought."
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