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."
Absolutely not (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure it *COULD* be... (Score:4, Insightful)
FUD? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
One more, cannot prove you shared it... (Score:5, Insightful)
5) Even if you owned a file that was without a shadow of a doubt pirated, that doesn't matter if they can't prove you SHARED it. If you just own it all you MIGHT be liable for the 0.99 the song could be purchased for, not the 200x damages they normally seek in lawsuits. There is no way to prove, from a file, that YOU have shared it as opposed to someone else.
Follow the money (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Apple creates this service to upload your music
2) User's upload massive amounts of pirated music
3) Apple passes to RIAA all the logins of people who have uploaded watermarked music
4) RIAA sues these people with massively punitive lawsuits
5) Apple profits!!... profits?!?! Right? Hey, where are all our iPhone customers going?
Such a move is entirely not in Apple's best interest and Apple would not let such a thing happen. Nor would Google or Amazon, unless compelled by a court of law. Steve spent months negotiating so they wouldn't get sued, they wouldn't turn around and allow their customers to be sued en masse. All the Android fans could only hope that Apple would be this galactically stupid.
Actually... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is much worse with Amazon, Google, DropBox, etc. With those services you're uploading the file itself to their servers. The RIAA could stomp in with a fancypants court order and demand to see your music collection.
With iCloud you're not uploading the file; you're getting the "right" to play a different copy of the file that already exists on Apple's servers. Even if the RIAA came in, it's not clear there's much they could do.
Re:Follow the money (Score:5, Insightful)
> All the Android fans could only hope that Apple would be this galactically stupid.
Which is exactly why this article was posted in the first place.
Re:I don't see the appeal of clouds (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not marketed towards you, if you're willing to set up, configure, and run your own music server. This is marked towards the people with enormous music collections at home, who want to be able to listen to any song in their library on their mobile device at any time, without having to worry about whether their data is synced.
Your "wisdom" is no deeper than someone who says, "Why would I go out to a restaurant, when I could cook a gourmet meal myself?" or "Why would I take my car into the shop, when I'm perfectly capable of diagnosing and repairing any problems that it might be experiencing?" Cloud storage is offering a valuable service to those without the expertise or patience to do it themselves.
Re:Absolutely not (Score:4, Insightful)
a) Who cares what Apple thinks or their brand (in context of this discussion). If the RIAA or one of it's members files suit and gets access to music stored in iCloud in discovery, Apple has to obey the law. Apple's employees probably care a lot more about not going to jail for contempt of court than they do about getting your business or being cool. All the money and lawyers in the world will not intimidate a Federal Court Judge who spends the better part of their career dealing with litigation between companies, governments and people with more money than God.
b) If 90% of Apple's customers use iCloud for storing pirated music, that will be a problem with the business plan, unless you are right about some legal/license arrangement existing in advance.
c) Assume nothing. It would be wise to read the contract, terms of service and any license agreement between the labels, RIAA and Apple before putting yourself and your family at risk. Personally, I hope Apple has got a solution on this. If not, then I'd rather not be left out in the wind like iPhone developers are right now (see Lodsys).
Re:I don't see the appeal of clouds (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, you are out of touch.
Most people do not have the skills or desire to set up their own FTP site, even if iCloud didn't do a lot more for ease of use than a simple FTP site. Do you want to set up a streaming service? Write the apps to automatically download the songs to your device? Even if the user had the skills to set up all of these services, do they have the skills and abilities to keep them secure?
I have my own FTP server set up and even that's getting to be a pain in the butt for me to maintain. I'm moving to hosted environments as quickly as I can at this point - they're good enough now and I don't have to dick about maintaining the hardware and OS anymore. I'm looking forward to the day when I can simply own one computer again.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Absolutely not (Score:5, Insightful)
Google good. Apple bad.
Please report to the nearest /. reeducation center.
You think you're being sarcastic, but your comment is 100% accurate. Apple is the single most evil corporation I'm aware of, and Google is the single most ethical corporation I'm aware of.
You need to meet more corporations.
Re:Admiral Akbar saw this coming (Score:4, Insightful)
Not quite. It has the user's email address in a tag which is easily removed.
which will rarely be done by Joe Filesharer
Which is not illegal to do, and won't happen anyway.
at this point you are proving to be either ill-informed, or sitting in the RDF (both?). there is little hope in helping you understand the gravity and the possibilities; bummer.
Re:Transcoding doesn't fool YouTube's Content ID (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that Apple is in bed with the recording industry
Having an agreement which allows copying copyrighted material to several devices SIMULTANEOUSLY is HARDLY "in bed with the recording industry."
Quit trolling.