iTunes Match is iPiracy, claims loopy Oz industry troll 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 …
One good way of fighting piracy is to make it easy for pirates to go legitimate. It's a good win-win situation. With a stroke of the pen (or the quill, or the electrons), pirates can join the community without any fear of past indiscretions over their head, and the community has less pirates preying on it. For example, George the First pardoned over three hundred pirates (of the "shiver me timbers" persuasion) in 1717.
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~bmuwgw/pirates.htm
Of course, His Majesty's Reasons were different. These ex-pirates could then be reclassified as "privateers"; they remained just one letter of marque away from preying on Spanish booty in the name of England.
Still, the principle remains. If you are going to have laws, make it EASY to be law-abiding. "Laundering" naughty mp3s is quite a sensible way to achieve the goal.
you just don't GET it. having an absolutely byzantine legal system, where no one understands it is CLEARLY a complete benefit (if you happen to be a lawyer). (Lawyers) Want it to be hard to follow the law, that way they have a never-ending business. Hrm... this gentleman happens to be a lawyer... funny, that!
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" --Henry VI, Act IV, Scene II
I think that as a lawyer he is trying to do his job, interpret the law and decide if something is legal. I can understand his point that Apple could be helping people "launder" their music. I think most people would agree that a music recording has some dollar value.
An analogy would perhaps be banking $1000, with a sneaky counterfeited $50 stuck in the bunch. The bank may credit me that $50, but it would be wrong to do so.
We actually need lawyers to help interpret the law here. Music distribution is changing radically, and we need to explore what this means. I am not an advocate of the RIAA who seem to think that nothing has changed in the past 15 years in the music industry... unfortunately they have all the highly paid lawyers on their side.
That would be the court's and the judges job to interpret the law.
His job as a lawyer is to a) try to convince the court that his interpretation is the correct one.
or b) to scare the public enough that his interpretation doesn't get challlenged in court (ACS anyone?).
And a better analogy would be the bristol zoo carpark attendant myth.
As I understand it has a limit of 20,000 tracks, which seems pretty generous, but a few things spring to mind about this whole thing.
It seems that it may discourage people from actually buying music from iTunes. I mean, if you can download a bad quality rip from a torrent site, and then press the "Refresh Match" button in iTunes, you suddenly get a better quality, legal copy.
As a one off amnesty I can see the music companies get money they would otherwise never see (and people who buy their music legally, get it stored in the cloud, and available on ten devices for $25pa, which seems reasonable). But I can certainly imagine sales at iTunes dropping as a result.
And as someone already noted, if this is going to work on tags of files (as album art does), then you could just change the meta data of a few files, and get the new music you want, without even the hassle of finding in on a torrent site. In fact, surely it would be easy to write a program that does that for you - input a link to the album, and get back the actual music courtesy of Apple?
Apple takes 30% just for being special. The remaining 70% will likely be split 58/12 - 58% of the remainder to labels, 12% for the US publishing. This will have to change for non-US royalties because publishing is administered differently in the US from almost everywhere else in the world because the rest of the world usually has just one unified collection agency per country, not two or three!
Thing is, the actual amount on which the royalty will be calculated will be an absolute pittance - revenues will probably be similar to Spotify (where you need hundreds of thousands of plays to earn $100).
So I dont upload my music, it scans my library, matches to itunes and then gives me access to that music on itunes..
How does it check that the music it finds on my PC is actually the track that it says?
Could I for instance take an mp3 of me singing in the bath, add the metadata for something else and then get cloudy access to the something else?
Or (as may be more likley) have I misunderstood the whole thing?
So if I have a legit copy of some music on my pc, and the record labels do not have a valid licence for that music but distribute it anyway (not uncommon), then this system will provide me with up to 9 pirate 'copies' without me knowing. Do Apple indemnify me against being sued in this case ?
This solicitor has one of three frames of mind at work:
1) Legitimately trying to protect IP under Australian law
2) Trolling people and the government
3) Highlighting the backwards nature of Aus IP law, in that making a backup copy is technically illegal, as is using one legitimate song on more than one device
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".
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
