Might iCloud Be a Musical Honeypot? 375
An anonymous reader writes "Between watermarked MP3 files and matching identical files, iCloud Music Match might wind up being a giant trap for finding owners of illegally copied files should the RIAA subpoena the evidence."
Re:Absolutely not (Score:3, Informative)
In addition, does this criticism not apply to Google's budding Music service?
Stupid argument for several reasons (Score:2, Informative)
1) Apple doesn't get the file; that would take forever. They fingerprint or otherwise use ID information from the file to see what song you get. Without the file there is no "proof".
2) The implied message of the program is to bring pirates in "out of the cold" with a blanket payment. The music industry doesn't care as they finally get something instead of nothing. They would not seek to kill this golden egg they are about to hatch.
3) Suing individuals has just about run the course; there is no profit in it (for the music industry, movie industry is just getting started there).
4) No way for the most part to distinguish between copies you ripped off a CD and downloaded.
This story is an Apple Haters wet dream, they same technique they always try where they take something positive Apple is doing (providing a way to move away from pirating music for the masses) and twisting it into some distorted version that is actually evil in some way. The music industry itself has and will be evil incarnate, but Apple has treated the consumer quite well to date and really served as a needed buffer between the populace and ravening madness that is the combined record industry.
Re:You guys are completely paranoid (Score:3, Informative)
RTFA. Each time you rip from a disk, the rip is slightly different. If twenty people have the exact same file, they'll know that at least 19 of them didn't get it by ripping disks.
Remember SDMI? (Score:5, Informative)
Because YouTube is looking for a particular song.
And Apple is looking for a particular song to stream it to the user.
The watermarks allow them to trace a song to the person who bought it.
So we have two separate pieces of information to convey: the identity of the work and the provenance of the copy. YouTube's Content ID adequately identifies the work, leaving inaudible watermarks to identify the provenance. Do you remember the SDMI challenge [wikipedia.org], involving watermarks that were allegedly inaudible but could allegedly survive a transcode?