
Why Copyright Holders Love iTunes Match And Pirates Hate It - bjonathan
http://blogs.forbes.com/parmyolson/2011/06/08/why-copyright-holders-love-itunes-match-and-pirates-hate-it/
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dasil003
Pure linkbait.

The article paints pirates as whiny little children decrying cloud-based
streaming services impact on their ability to pirate in much the same impotent
way that the music industry 10 years ago decried Napster's impact on their
ability to sell CDs for $18.99. All the while ignoring the most basic of
details: iTunes is not a streaming service, and the files aren't DRM'ed!

The reality is that "pirate" is not a binary distinction. Painting this as
some kind of partisan conflict doesn't serve anybody. What's going on here is
that streaming companies like Spotify are finally offering a compelling
service that precludes a lot of people's desire to pirate. They've finally
figured out how to compete with free. You'd have to travel pretty far and wide
to find a pirate who is wringing their hands over this the way the article
portrays.

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extension
iCloud stores non-DRM copies of music on your devices, right? And iTunes Match
songs get all the same privileges as stuff you buy from iTunes, right? So, how
can Apple "control your music"? Can they delete files you store locally? Or
prevent you from sharing them on The Pirate Bay?

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ryusage
No, the whole point of the iCloud service is that the music is stored on
Apple's servers. It sounds like it is then synced from their servers to your
devices. So presumably, if they wanted to, they could remove or block your
access to particular files on their server, and have your local copies of
those files deleted on the next sync.

I'm not sure how likely that is to ever actually happen, though. That sounds a
little sensationalistic to me.

~~~
isleyaardvark
It's entirely sensationalistic. What's the difference between "Apple could
decide which iCloud music you can't have" and "Apple could decide which iTunes
songs you can't redownload"? Or "Google could decide which emails in gmail you
can't have anymore"?

The only realistic danger with iCloud is the same as with any other cloud
service: the company accidentally loses your data. Even in that case there's
not much danger. You use iTunes match, you download copies of the matches to
your local computer, you back them up.

~~~
revicon
It's not without precedent. Amazon blew away all local copies of 1984 from
Kindles on it's network in 09...

[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html)

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gavingmiller
One question I had - that I had hoped the article would touch - is what's
stopping Apple from compiling a giant list of those that have downloaded
illegal music and handing it over to the RIAA? Aside from the huge amount of
ill will that an action like that would create.

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ryusage
Because there's no reliable way to identify which files were pirated and which
were legitimately obtained from non-iTunes sources. The files all look the
same, for the most part.

I guess some do have tags that say who ripped them, which would certainly be a
tip off. Even then, though, I'm not sure how easily you could automate it to
differentiate between tags that indicate piracy and tags that do not.

~~~
kemayo
You could hash the files and say that 50,000 people all had an identical mp3
of a track. Given tagging, subtle differences between CD drives, and the lossy
encoding process it'd be fairly probable that they all got it from the same
place.

Of course, that's not the same thing as proving in each case that they really
did pirate it, but it'd be a start as a way of building a list of people to
look at.

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hyperbovine
I have no qualms about downloading an MP3 of a track that I already physically
own but am too lazy to unearth and rip. Hope they'll take that into account.

~~~
kemayo
Ethically I agree, and I think that most other people would as well.

However... I'd suspect it's still illegal, especially if you used bittorrent
and thus gave copies out to other people.

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Locke1689
The comparison to Spotify is misguided because Spotify isn't selling you music
-- you have no legal ownership of any music you listen to on Spotify. Spotifiy
is selling you a subscription to listen to as much music as you want through
their service. Whether or not there's music stored on local drives any more is
irrelevant for Spotify because you don't own what's stored there anyway.

Personally, I'd much rather pay the monthly fee because I listen to much more
music than I could ever buy in a conventional manner.

~~~
grimen
Yes, I also found Apple's comparisons in the WWDC event to be fale claims.
They seem to only compare themselves to Google and Amazon of PR reasons. THey
know they can't compare to the streaming services...even though they are 1:1
competitors in my view.

P.S. You can buy music on Spotify as well, but it's not the core idea and I
don't know any people that have. Though almost every person I know in Sweden
pay for Premium.

~~~
grimen
And worth to mention: Every user of Spotify I've talked to laugh at the iTunes
move, they won't leave Spotify for sure. Even my mom consider "the new" iTunes
a failure.

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shinratdr
Wow that was a terrible article. The author misunderstands iTunes Match so
badly that the whole thing makes no sense. It's ALL local copies, idiot.

