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Might iCloud Be a Musical Honeypot?
An anonymous reader writes "Between watermarked MP3 files and matching identical files, iCloud Music Match might wind up being a giant trap for finding owners of illegally copied files should the RIAA subpoena the evidence."
Apple as a company cares a lot more about their brand image than most. If suddenly Apple had 90% of it's customers who uploaded pirated music being sued because of a service Apple provided - it would be bad. I'd assume that yearly fee you pay goes to the RIAA, because Apple being a hardware company cares little about software when it is driving their hardware sales.
even though there was only 1 comment when I clicked, I knew I would be too late.
... but it won't be effective, because pirates won't utilize it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Doesn't the same problem apply to the music lockers (Amazon, Google) or even Dropbox? Why single out iCloud?
Am I out of touch or am I, by default, wise? I look at these services and think "why would I want that? I have an ftp site of my own anyway."
Considering there must be a business model behind these services to make $$$ I wonder what I might have to put up with
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Transcoding doesn't fool YouTube's Content ID. Why should it fool iCloud Music Match?
You guys are completely paranoid.
There is no telling the difference between a CD that iTunes ripped or aggregated from your disk (which might have been ripped prior to iTunes' existence). Remember MacAMP (or any *AMP)? How about SoundJam? There was music before iTunes. (I tell ya!)
They are SELLING you an online subscription to "upgrade" (ie, crossgrade) this music to their catalog. This way they can stream to your devices and... believe it or not... possible upcoming thin, storage-less inexpensive devices.
The only trap in there, if any, is user's reliance on a yearly subscription; how many times are you willing to pay for the music you already own?
1) Apple doesn't get the file; that would take forever. They fingerprint or otherwise use ID information from the file to see what song you get. Without the file there is no "proof".
2) The implied message of the program is to bring pirates in "out of the cold" with a blanket payment. The music industry doesn't care as they finally get something instead of nothing. They would not seek to kill this golden egg they are about to hatch.
3) Suing individuals has just about run the course; there is no profit in it (for the music industry, movie industry is just getting started there).
4) No way for the most part to distinguish between copies you ripped off a CD and downloaded.
This story is an Apple Haters wet dream, they same technique they always try where they take something positive Apple is doing (providing a way to move away from pirating music for the masses) and twisting it into some distorted version that is actually evil in some way. The music industry itself has and will be evil incarnate, but Apple has treated the consumer quite well to date and really served as a needed buffer between the populace and ravening madness that is the combined record industry.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, because Apple wants to spend hundreds of millions of dollars creating and promoting its iCloud service just so that they can bring the hammer down on pirates and drive everyone away to other services. That makes sense. Maybe Slashdot is getting a little paranoid and forgetting what companies actually care about (money). Seriously, how did this type of paranoia get to the front page without being flagged as "makes no economic sense". Besides, if Apple were going to do that, then why haven't they already leveraged their iTunes application to do the exact same thing?
5) Even if you owned a file that was without a shadow of a doubt pirated, that doesn't matter if they can't prove you SHARED it. If you just own it all you MIGHT be liable for the 0.99 the song could be purchased for, not the 200x damages they normally seek in lawsuits. There is no way to prove, from a file, that YOU have shared it as opposed to someone else.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Because YouTube is looking for a particular song.
And Apple is looking for a particular song to stream it to the user.
The watermarks allow them to trace a song to the person who bought it.
So we have two separate pieces of information to convey: the identity of the work and the provenance of the copy. YouTube's Content ID adequately identifies the work, leaving inaudible watermarks to identify the provenance. Do you remember the SDMI challenge, involving watermarks that were allegedly inaudible but could allegedly survive a transcode?
1) Apple creates this service to upload your music
2) User's upload massive amounts of pirated music
3) Apple passes to RIAA all the logins of people who have uploaded watermarked music
4) RIAA sues these people with massively punitive lawsuits
5) Apple profits!!... profits?!?! Right? Hey, where are all our iPhone customers going?
Such a move is entirely not in Apple's best interest and Apple would not let such a thing happen. Nor would Google or Amazon, unless compelled by a court of law. Steve spent months negotiating so they wouldn't get sued, they wouldn't turn around and allow their customers to be sued en masse. All the Android fans could only hope that Apple would be this galactically stupid.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
The problem is much worse with Amazon, Google, DropBox, etc. With those services you're uploading the file itself to their servers. The RIAA could stomp in with a fancypants court order and demand to see your music collection.
With iCloud you're not uploading the file; you're getting the "right" to play a different copy of the file that already exists on Apple's servers. Even if the RIAA came in, it's not clear there's much they could do.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
It's an MP3 file of a given size. Yes if the MD5s match, it is the same file.
Each time you rip from a disk, the rip is slightly different.
True. CD has one "subcode" byte per six samples to store timing information for the 588 audio samples in each sector. The digital data from several lossless rips is the same; it just has a random amount (up to one sector) of silence before and after it because drives are allowed to let the subcode data drift slightly out of sync from the audio data. This leads to so-called jitter. But rip jitter doesn't interfere with the ability to identify the actual timing of the first note of a song.
That doesn't answer the question. What motivation would Apple have to agree to something like that? It's completely absurd.
I like BASH as much as the next guy but I find it easier to *JUST NOT BUY SHIT MUSIC*.
That way, when I buy a really good CD, I get a nice warm fuzzy feeling about what great value £10 is for a piece of music that I may be listening to for the next 30 years plus and then feel more than happy to go buy another some time later.
I can then rip it to my heart's content, store it on a shelf as it's own backup, drop my trousers and wave my big fat hairy arse at lossy "pick 'n' mix" sweetie music & pointless iCloud technologies designed merely to part the incredibly dumb of yet more of their hard-earned cash.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
What user information is that, exactly? Apple will only have a list of what songs you have (it's not illegal to have a song)
Yeah, but Apple doesn't have to prove the songs are illegal. The whole point of the program is the assumption that you are replacing illegally obtained songs with good, clean songs. Just by signing up you are admitting guilt. So the user information would be names and contact information, a list of illegal songs you used their service to replace, and admission of guilt in the form of the TOS of the program you signed up for. All of the lawyers' work is done for them.
Not quite. It has the user's email address in a tag which is easily removed.
which will rarely be done by Joe Filesharer
Which is not illegal to do, and won't happen anyway.
at this point you are proving to be either ill-informed, or sitting in the RDF (both?). there is little hope in helping you understand the gravity and the possibilities; bummer.