Music Pirates Won't Rush To iCloud For Forgiveness

An anonymous reader writes "Lots of people have suggested there's a loophole in Apple's new iCloud that will allow people who illegally download music to somehow 'launder' their dirty music files, getting a nice clean, and legal, license to the music stored on iCloud. This argument is flawed for two main reasons. The first has to do with how the laws of copyright work and the second is to do with why people share or download music (and movies) in the first place."

Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[winterphoenix]

One thing the article missed was the fact that iTunes match will allows users to download 256kbps versions of the music in their libraries, regardless of the bitrate the user originally had. I know a lot of people who would be willing to pay $25 to upgrade their entire music collection to that bitrate, regardless of whether their collection was obtained legitimately or not.

o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[haxwk]

This iCloud thing (haven't heard much about it, I don't follow apple products) just sounds like a way for Apple to legally collect information on stupid music pirates (and probably who has ripped back-ups on their computer) that they can sell to record companies. It's like Steve Jobs saw the South Park episode "Human CentiPad" and figured it would be a good idea to coax people into unknowingly agreeing to let Apple screw over. This program is going to scan your files with the pretense that everything is legal. But of course if it finds anything that doesn't have a proper license it's probably illegal, and therefore Apple would be "inclined" to report to the authorities.

Can this possibly be secure?

[Zone-MR]

So let's get this straight... iTunes will allow you to replace a pirated copy of your music with an official download, presumably identifying the original track based on audio fingerprinting and/or file hashes.

I can't think of any way in which this could be designed not to be broken. I'm expecting people will quickly figure out a way to trade hashes/fingerprints, bypassing the requirement to even bother downloading a pirated copy. Or maybe if the threshold is low enough we'll get a Shazam-like app - that records snippets of music then presents them to iTunes as a ripped track for replacing with a HQ version.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[jessecurry]

I'd be shocked if that were the case. I think that this is really just a way for Apple to reduce storage costs. They've got this great new data center, but they don't want to fill it up with 500 copies of every song in their music library, encoded in all different formats and bitrates.

Re:Forgiveness?

[dotancohen]

Exactly how many pirates really care about "forgiveness"? While greater than 0, /me thinks they are overestimating the crushing guilt caused by pirating music from Sony and others.

I'd pay, but not for forgiveness. I download music illegally because that is the only way to get music where I live. The stores don't stock non-mainstream stuff, so if I want Pantera I need to go online for it. Amazon now sells MP3 files that will run on my Linux computer and I buy them, but before Amazon I had to download illegally. I have in fact purchased albums that I once downloaded illegally, now that I can. But I'm doing it slowly, one a month or so. I still have quite a bit to catch up.

If the *AA's wanted to prevent illegal downloading, they would have provided a legal option years ago.