iTunes Match is iPiracy, claims loopy Oz industry troll
It's like money-laundering!
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You can’t make this stuff up: the new Apple iTunes Match service has been described as “legitimizing piracy” by an Australian lawyer.
The US$24.99 per year Match service will identify and index the songs on a subscriber’s hard drive, locate those songs in iTunes, and add those tunes to the user’s account in the new Apple iCloud. The music industry gets its slice of the income, and users get the right to play their songs on as many as 10 devices.
However, Match doesn’t care if the originals on a user’s hard drive are legit or not: regardless of source, the “Matched” songs on the iCloud will come with a license.
This seems to have wound up an industry lawyer in Australia, who seem to have been drinking too much coffee.
Substituting an unauthorized copy of a song for a licensed copy is not, apparently, a user cleaning up his or her act: rather, it’s “laundering” that user’s past indiscretions, according to Brisbane lawyer Ken Philip, who among other things defends the rights to Hendrix material in Australia.
Freshly-licensed freetards would, it appear, become law-abiding citizens at a stroke. On the basis that this is apparently a bad thing, Philip told AustralianIT: “You could get rid of all your pirated versions of tracks that match Apple’s collection.”
Whether or when Australian pirates will have a chance to ruin the music industry’s day is up in the air. Apple has rolled out its standard boilerplate response to queries, saying it will not comment on when or if iTunes Match will launch here, whether it is in fact Wednesday, or when Apple will launch its Australian office. ®
COMMENTS
But isn't he technically correct?
This Oz chappy might have drunk too much coffee (I wouldn't know; I don't know him), but isn't he actually correct in what he is saying?
This 'laundering' was the thing that popped into my head when I first read about this iCloud nonsense a couple of days ago. I have no sympathy whatsoever with the recording industry, but what this guy is saying is correct - For $25 (or whatever it is), I can potentially convert my thousands of pirated CDs into 'virtual' legit ones. $25 hardly seems sufficient to compensate for this, so I would be getting a VERY good deal indeed (ignoring for now the crappy iTunes bit rates and any DRM etc etc). Multiply this by the millions of other people that are doing the same, and the cost per 'virtual' CD will come down to something approaching zero; not really providing any income at all for anyone (record company or artist) other than Apple.
This is no different from Google scanning and publishing all those books that it wants to without any regard for copyright and with no intention of paying the authors for their work.
I don't think commenters have understood what's at stake here
Whether there is DRM on this music library is irrelevant, because it's not needed. The music isn't stored on your devices under your control, it's stored in Apple's cloud under THEIR control. That's how they can limit your usage to 10 devices without any DRM - because you no longer have a copy of the music under your control. You merely stream it from Apple's cloud, which detects which device is connected and refuses the connection if you have more than 10 registered to your cloud account.
This is the REAL danger of the so-called "cloud". It's about transferring storage and control of your files from you to some 3rd party provider, who could theoretically lock, edit or delete them leaving you with no evidence they ever existed in the form you provided them. Or make them available to those who have enough money/power to convince the cloud provider to let them in. After all, money talks and bullshit walks.
I can see its usefulness - having your files accessible anywhere there is an Internet connection speaks for itself - but don't ever let it become a replacement for private storage. Otherwise the information revolution is well and truly lost, because the kind of manipulation of history envisaged by Orwell becomes trivial for the ruling bodies once everything is in "the cloud".
Ah, pot .. kettle, have a look at Switzerland..
Since March, the Swiss have been apparently investigating their equivalent of the RIAA (IFLI) for fraud in hit parades (i.e. market rigging) and effectively dictating what the stations play (read: they can promote or suppress records as they wish). That's probably not news to anyone, but the Swiss ministry of commerce considers that non-competitive behaviour, and the preliminary investigation has now just been converted into a formal one (that translates as "they have found enough to warrant to start digging for real"). IFPI also apparently force their members into signing contracts against non-IFLI controlled music imports, thus creating an illegal monopoly.
This isn't the first time they're in trouble - in 1994 a totally unknown band (Steamtrain) stormed the hit parade. Why? Sony (yup, that lot again) has worked out in which specific shop they had to buy to rig the charts and simply emptied stock there - but got recognised by the competition :-).
The consequences for IFPI and members (Sony, Warner, EMI and Universal) can be dire if the above is proven: talk is about fines to 10% of their turnover of the last 3 years.
In the process it may finally become clear how the company Media Control (aptly named, no?) calculates their charts. At present, it's far from transparent..
(http://preview.tinyurl.com/ifli-bastards for those who speak German - Blick is like the UK Sun, but sometimes it does come up with good stories).
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