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Music Pirates Won't Rush To iCloud For Forgiveness
An anonymous reader writes "Lots of people have suggested there's a loophole in Apple's new iCloud that will allow people who illegally download music to somehow 'launder' their dirty music files, getting a nice clean, and legal, license to the music stored on iCloud. This argument is flawed for two main reasons. The first has to do with how the laws of copyright work and the second is to do with why people share or download music (and movies) in the first place."
Exactly how many pirates really care about "forgiveness"? While greater than 0, /me thinks they are overestimating the crushing guilt caused by pirating music from Sony and others.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Have I missed something? Why would someone who downloaded their music want to "launder" it? Maybe in world where we are forced to prove that our music was legally obtained, but I have not heard of anyone being put in that situation.
Palm trees and 8
I would bet that the studios aren't nearly as concerned with any faux legitimacy this gives to already pirated songs as they are with the possibility of users sharing username/passwords for their iCloud accounts (sharing their entire music collections en masse). Jimmy re-downloading a song he's already ripped isn't nearly as bad for business as Jimmy sharing his 8,000 song music collection with all his friends.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Audiophiles get a bad rap for spending money on things that nobody can really tell a difference between, but really it's all a sliding scale of how much "better" (or "different") do you want to get vs. how much money do you not care if you spend.
I bought the $200 headphone cable for my $400 headphones back when I had money to burn (ah the good ole days). Was it noticeably better than the $12 cable that comes with the headphones? yes. was it $188 better? Hell fucking no. not in my opinion anyway.
Are my $400 headphones better than my $250 headphones? maybe. probably. not by very much though. Are both of them better than my $100 headphones? yes. Are $1200 headphones better than anything I own? Probably... but also likely not by very much.
Just like any given hobby, the first small/medium sized chunk of money into gets you 90% of the ultimate potential quality, and then you can spend hundreds more to get to 95%, then thousands to get to 99%, and then possibly never get to 100% no matter how much you spend.
When you hear audiophiles rave over "how much product X is than product Y", what they're generally doing is disregarding that first 90% of quality that everybody has, and talking about the differences, the remaining 10% or so. Because that's not clear to the casual reader, they look like idiots for spending $100 on a cable that makes almost no difference. Perhaps they are spending irresponsibly if that money should be going elsewhere to bills, etc... but if they have the money to spend, who is to say that whatever enjoyment they're getting out of their super low oxygen, quadruple shielded, magnesium tipped, fluorescent purple cables isn't worth every penny they spent, to them at least?
Note, I'm not talking about the people who are off the scientific deep end and debating which brand SATA cable attached to their hard drive produces the best sounding mp3s.
This will not happen.
News flash: Steve Jobs is very, very good at business.
Getting your clients sued for 100 times their net worth is very, very, very bad for business.
QED.
True audiophiles only listen to the voices in their heads.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Who cares?
Long Answer: There is nothing in copyright law that states that owning a copy of some media, no matter the origin, is illegal. There are plenty of provisions to restrict copying, distribution or alteration - but nothing about possession.
You will note that all of the RIAA cases brought to court to date were explicitly about 'sharing music' and not about 'downloading music' or 'having music'. There is a reason.
Culture is more than commerce