Is this perpetual? For example, could I pay my yearly subscription fee, torrent anything I want, upload it and get a legit version? If so, this is $25 a year for all the music I want.
Which, if the labels have agreed to that, it's very surprising. It's sort of a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" strategy: they start getting a cut of this fee from every participating pirate, which is a lot more than they used to get ($0), but a lot less than they wish they could get ($15 per album).
Here's what I don't understand about your (and a lot of people's, I don't mean to pick on you) comments, please help me understand this:
Pirated files are not necessarily identifiable as such, not in the digital world. If I download some albums from what.cd, you can't tell they're pirated, maybe I ripped them with the exact same version of LAME. What I'm trying to say is that today, having a pirated file isn't a property of the file, it's a property of how you got ahold of that file.
I don't understand what you mean when you say the service "legitimizes" (paraphrase) existing music. All it does is exchange one set of bits for another set of bits, and this set of bits or that set of bits don't make an audio file legitimate or illegitimate.
I mean it's a bit like transcoding, isn't it? Except instead of doing it yourself, you're paying Apple to do it. The fact that a third party is providing the service doesn't necessarily mean that the process as a whole is legit, in the same way that taking a PDF of a book to FedEx Kinko's to print doesn't make the copy legit, in the same way that buying a Windows upgrade to upgrade your old pirated Windows doesn't make the resulting license legit.
I realize we're in kind of a special circumstance here because Apple has paid the music labels a lot of money, but we're just speculating about what the contents of their license enables them to do, which is probably only to be indemnified in the event that people use the service with pirated music (but not to indemnify the actual users).
No, I see your point. I guess it's an open question for me whether this is a transcoding service or a music license.
Arguably, if I have a crappy MP3, and I pay Apple money, and they give me a version with a higher encoding rate, they have sold me the new bits for that song. Maybe the terms don't say that, but I think one could argue that I've paid for a copy of the song.
In fact, I think that the labels, in an effort to make us repurchase our records as tapes and our tapes as CDs and our CDs as files, have tried to tie the license to the format. So that seems to back the idea that this deal gives me a license for the AAC-formatted file. Whether I had one for the MP3 is irrelevant, right?
And would it be so bad if that's how the law sees it? This could actually be a boon for the recording industry. It could be win-win if pirates decide to do this: they start paying for music, they still get all the music they want, and they shift the distribution burden to BitTorrent and iTunes.
The fact that a third party is providing the service doesn't necessarily mean that the process as a whole is legit, in the same way that taking a PDF of a book to FedEx Kinko's to print doesn't make the copy legit, in the same way that buying a Windows upgrade to upgrade your old pirated Windows doesn't make the resulting license legit.
Except that once you use iTunes Match, the resulting audio files are legally licensed, in the same way they would be had you purchased them from iTunes. Here the third party, Apple, is providing that legitimacy as a service ostensibly due to licensing agreements between Apple and the industry players. While actually grabbing the files off of a tracker is still not necessarily legal, the ultimate outcome of the process is that you will have legal copies, thanks to Apple and whatever licensing deals they've made. In other words, everyone wins: I get my music, Apple provides a (hopefully) decent service, and the music industry has found a vector for tapping into those supposed loss in sales.
That's a huge assumption that I doubt very much will survive the EULA you'd need to agree to in order to use iTunes Match. It seems unlikely that the labels have licensed Apple to run the world's biggest pirated-music-laundering service.
And if Apple or this service is de-legitimized through Apple going out of business and shutting it down in a decade or two (hey, it could happen) - or due to licensing disputes down the line with the record companies. Well.. Hope you backed up the original files. That's a good question, actually:
If you keep the old files around, and five years from now cancel the subscription.. ultimately it's likely you've paid much, much more than the original collection was worth. Are the old ripped files still legitimate, or do they cease to be?
Once you have a receipt from Apple for the music, you have proof of ownership.
If you accidentally lost the CD between then and the time you get your PC taken away for discovery in a copyright infringement lawsuit, that's plausible deniability.
At least, way more so than just having 2TB of MP3s laying around with no media you ripped them from at all...
The reality here seems to be, people don't get busted for the 2TB of unlawful music they keep on their hard drives. They get busted for the gigabytes of music they actively transmit on P2P networks. So while this is a valid geek conundrum, it may not be of any practical import.
It would be like presuming guilt, you don't have to prove those mp3s are legal they have to prove that you stole them. Also having mp3s isn't the same as distributing mp3s. tptacek is right I believe. As far as I understand it, every p2p case has been about distribution or suspicion of distribution (make available argument). And they have to have a reason to come scan your computer. Hence why I won't be using this "scan and buy" service, the scan part is dumb.
Also as far as I know all my Amazon MP3 are identical to other users Amazon MP3 I don't think they have watermarks. How could you tell if they were mine or taken from someone.
In a civil prosecution (which is how copyright violation ought normally be handled, particularly at the individual consumer level) the burden of proof is usually only "the balance of probabilities" (i.e. more likely to be true than not be true), not "beyond a reasonable doubt".
(Of course, media companies would prefer that the government pass laws, pay for and implement the job of enforcing media company contracts, and this muddies the waters.)
That brings up a very interesting point - copyright lawsuits are currently civil affairs, and require a much lower burden of proof.
The 'Industry' is pushing for it to become a felony, which would squarely sit it 'beyond a reasonable doubt' territory. My understanding is their current cases are full of little holes like this - would making it a felony actually make it easier for people to get away without convictions?
It sounds to me like a way to "launder" possibly-pirated music. Exchanging mp3s for iCloud songs is analogous to exchanging cash for bank account money.
It doesn't seem to be a license. It seems to be an agreement between Apple and the labels that basically allows for fair-use treatment. Basically, if you already own the songs, you have the license and you're just having Apple provide a convenience service for you - syncing your music to all your devices as high-quality 256k AAC files. You aren't getting a new license for them. You'll perpetually have the files, but it isn't something that will change your legal status.
I'm guessing one of the reasons the labels agreed to this is that it provides them with ammunition that what Apple is doing isn't fair-use. If it was fair-use, Apple wouldn't be paying the labels. Therefore, Amazon, et. al. need to pay the labels for such services too. It sets a precedent that the labels like.
The fact that someone paid for something shouldn't hold any legal water. Just because you suckered someone into paying you money that they didn't need to, shouldn't be able to influence how a court interprets the law. Especially the way that huge corporate interests like that will pay large sums of money to err on the side of caution and avoid a legal battle.
I'm not sure I understand the annual subscription. If I don't renew my subscription, does all my ripped/uploaded music go away? Or do I just lose access to more ripping/uploading?
It appears to be the ability to 'upload' or match new songs and then have them wirelessly sync over the internet to all of your devices would disappear.
AAC doesn't have the ability to 'expire' content, as far as I know?
I guess the question is: When I upload something to iCloud, does that actually get synced to all of my devices or do all these things just have streaming access to iCloud? If it actually syncs all of the files, do they go away from all but the original computer after the service is terminated? I.e. if you use this to convert pirated files to legal AAC, do all of the synced AAC files disappear, leaving you only with the original pirated MP3s when you stop paying Apple?
I don't know what the demographic spread here is, but I'm 99.99% sure that none of the 800 people on my phone/facebook pay for every CD they want. More frequently, I find people buy CDs to support certain artists, and not just to have a legal copy.
If this is the case, Apple's move is actually ingenious. I daresay a lot of pirates (who currently contribute $0) will pay $25/year for their music to be legal... for legal or moral reasons. The potential loss of revenue will lie on the people who buy 1-2 CDs/year. However, $25/year is likely more than the average amount these people pay, so it's still a plus, even if they stop buying the original CDs. I bet though, they won't.
Piracy is still going to happen; this way the record labels get a cut. If they make it easier than pirating it will be popular. I switched to amazon downloads because it was much easier than buying a CD and ripping it and I cannot live with DRM. Not to mention faster than waiting for the package to arrive.
Torrenting those files will still be illegal and that doesn’t change after you sign up for this service and pay. It’s not an amnesty. (Also: Pirates are usually not caught by looking at the files they have on their HDD. Whether you have the original torrented files or Apple’s music files around doesn’t make a difference.)
You can get those pirated files in slightly better quality and you won’t have to upload them to Apple if you want to use their music locker. Big deal.
True, but if you 'convert' a large collection today, then you skip the possibility that Apple will implement anti-piracy features in the future. With Amazon and Google, no one can really be sure what the status is right now. Especially since you are uploading bit-for-bit copies of the files to those cloud services.
In financial terms, Apple is running an exchange, while Google and Amazon are running a safety deposit service. If someone looks in the safety deposit and finds illegal items, you are caught. If someone looks in Apple's music locker, you only see Apple's AAC-encoded content (though I guess they didn't cover how that works with music that you didn't buy through Apple and they don't carry on iTunes).
Which, if the labels have agreed to that, it's very surprising. It's sort of a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" strategy: they start getting a cut of this fee from every participating pirate, which is a lot more than they used to get ($0), but a lot less than they wish they could get ($15 per album).