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."

Comments

Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[winterphoenix]

One thing the article missed was the fact that iTunes match will allows users to download 256kbps versions of the music in their libraries, regardless of the bitrate the user originally had. I know a lot of people who would be willing to pay $25 to upgrade their entire music collection to that bitrate, regardless of whether their collection was obtained legitimately or not.

Can this possibly be secure?

[Zone-MR]

So let's get this straight... iTunes will allow you to replace a pirated copy of your music with an official download, presumably identifying the original track based on audio fingerprinting and/or file hashes.

I can't think of any way in which this could be designed not to be broken. I'm expecting people will quickly figure out a way to trade hashes/fingerprints, bypassing the requirement to even bother downloading a pirated copy. Or maybe if the threshold is low enough we'll get a Shazam-like app - that records snippets of music then presents them to iTunes as a ripped track for replacing with a HQ version.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[jessecurry]

I'd be shocked if that were the case. I think that this is really just a way for Apple to reduce storage costs. They've got this great new data center, but they don't want to fill it up with 500 copies of every song in their music library, encoded in all different formats and bitrates.