Slashdot Mirror
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.
Doesn't the same problem apply to the music lockers (Amazon, Google) or even Dropbox? Why single out iCloud?
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."
This is not marketed towards you, if you're willing to set up, configure, and run your own music server. This is marked towards the people with enormous music collections at home, who want to be able to listen to any song in their library on their mobile device at any time, without having to worry about whether their data is synced.
Your "wisdom" is no deeper than someone who says, "Why would I go out to a restaurant, when I could cook a gourmet meal myself?" or "Why would I take my car into the shop, when I'm perfectly capable of diagnosing and repairing any problems that it might be experiencing?" Cloud storage is offering a valuable service to those without the expertise or patience to do it themselves.