The Bruce Willis iTunes story

On September 3, 2012, the British press reported that Bruce Willis was considering legal action against Apple over his wish to leave his digital music collection to his daughters. The reports described a large library and floated a workaround — that his lawyers were looking at family trusts as the “holders” of downloaded music.

It was picked up everywhere within hours. Technology outlets, wire services, financial press. It is, by a wide margin, the most-repeated fact about digital inheritance in the English language.

It was not true. His wife, Emma Heming Willis, said so on Twitter the same day: “it's not a true story.” Outlets that had run it, including TechCrunch, published corrections. Rolling Stone's headline was the plainest: Bruce Willis Did Not Sue Apple Over His iTunes Library.

This entry exists because of what happened next. The correction travelled a tenth as far as the story, and the story was, on the law, essentially correct. A false report about a real problem is a strange thing to have to write about — so let us do the useful half properly.

You did not buy it. You licensed it.

The button says Buy. The contract does not.

Digital media sold through the major platforms — Apple, Amazon, Google, Steam, the streaming services — is delivered under a licence, and the licence is personal, non-exclusive, and non-transferable. You have paid for permission to play something, on your account, on a limited number of devices, for as long as the licence lasts. You have not acquired a thing that can be handed to somebody else.

That distinction is not a technicality invented by lawyers to be annoying. It is the difference between two categories of property, and it decides everything downstream:

• A physical copy is owned. The CD, the vinyl, the hardback, the DVD on the shelf. You own that particular copy, and under the first sale doctrine, 17 U.S.C. §109, you may sell it, lend it, give it away, or leave it in your will. Copyright law is finished with that copy the moment it is sold.
• A digital file is licensed. The first sale doctrine attaches to a lawfully made physical copy — the phonorecord — not to the file. The courts have said so explicitly.
• Which is why resale markets do not exist. In Capitol Records, LLC v. ReDigi Inc., the Southern District of New York held in 2013 that a platform for reselling “used” digital music files infringed, because transferring a file necessarily makes a new copy, and first sale protects distribution rather than reproduction. The Second Circuit affirmed in December 2018, 910 F.3d 649. There is no lawful second-hand market in digital downloads, and the reason is structural, not commercial.

So the reported Willis position was legally sound even though the report was false. The licence does not survive you — or more precisely, it terminates on the terms the platform wrote, and no probate court can order otherwise, because a licence is not the platform's property to transfer any more than it is yours.

Apple's own inheritance tool says the same thing

The most persuasive evidence that the underlying point is real does not come from a court. It comes from Apple's own documentation.

In 2021 Apple introduced Legacy Contact — a genuinely good feature that lets you name people who can request access to your account data after your death, using an access key plus a death certificate. It is exactly the “online tool” that Florida's digital-assets statute puts at the top of its priority ladder.

Apple's support page describes what a Legacy Contact may reach: photos, messages, notes, files, device backups, and more. And then it lists, in terms, what is not included: “movies, music, books, or subscriptions you purchased with your Apple Account, and data stored in your iCloud Keychain (payment information, passwords, and passkeys).”

Read that list twice, because it is the whole case. The purpose-built inheritance mechanism, offered by the company that sold you the media, expressly excludes the media. It hands over the photographs your family actually wants and withholds the film library you paid for. Both of those decisions follow from the same distinction: your photographs are yours; the movie is licensed.

The Keychain exclusion is the second half of the lesson and gets almost no attention. The passwords do not pass either. Naming a legacy contact does not hand anyone your credentials, which is why the password problem is a separate problem with a separate solution.

The inventory nobody makes

Strip out the myth and a workable checklist remains. Some digital things are property and pass; some are licences and do not; a few are ambiguous enough to be worth a clause.

• Passes: files you created and hold. Photographs, video, documents, manuscripts, code, recordings. You own the copyright in your own work, and copyright is property that passes under a will or by intestacy.
• Passes: physical media. Discs, books, records. Owned outright, first sale applies, leave them to whoever you like.
• Passes: accounts with a cash balance or a transferable asset behind them. Exchange-held cryptocurrency, brokerage accounts, PayPal balances, domain name registrations in most registrars' terms.
• Does not pass: licensed media. Purchased films, television, music, and ebooks on the major platforms. Streaming subscriptions, obviously.
• Does not pass, usually: game accounts, loyalty points, and airline miles. Governed by terms of service that generally prohibit transfer, though some programmes make discretionary exceptions on presentation of a death certificate.

One practical consequence that surprises people: the files you ripped from your own CDs in 2004 are in a different legal position from the files you bought on iTunes in 2012. Neither is a great asset, but only one of them came with a contract saying it dies with you.

And the honest bottom line for most families. The media library is not the loss. Nobody grieves a film collection. What families actually want back is the photographs, the messages, and the documents — and those are the things the statutes and the online tools do reach, if somebody set them up.