One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year

Arguably, if I have a crappy MP3, and I pay Apple money, and they give me a version with a higher encoding rate, they have sold me the new bits for that song. Maybe the terms don't say that, but I think one could argue that I've paid for a copy of the song.

In fact, I think that the labels, in an effort to make us repurchase our records as tapes and our tapes as CDs and our CDs as files, have tried to tie the license to the format. So that seems to back the idea that this deal gives me a license for the AAC-formatted file. Whether I had one for the MP3 is irrelevant, right?

And would it be so bad if that's how the law sees it? This could actually be a boon for the recording industry. It could be win-win if pirates decide to do this: they start paying for music, they still get all the music they want, and they shift the distribution burden to BitTorrent and iTunes.

If you accidentally lost the CD between then and the time you get your PC taken away for discovery in a copyright infringement lawsuit, that's plausible deniability.

At least, way more so than just having 2TB of MP3s laying around with no media you ripped them from at all...

Except that once you use iTunes Match, the resulting audio files are legally licensed, in the same way they would be had you purchased them from iTunes. Here the third party, Apple, is providing that legitimacy as a service ostensibly due to licensing agreements between Apple and the industry players. While actually grabbing the files off of a tracker is still not necessarily legal, the ultimate outcome of the process is that you will have legal copies, thanks to Apple and whatever licensing deals they've made. In other words, everyone wins: I get my music, Apple provides a (hopefully) decent service, and the music industry has found a vector for tapping into those supposed loss in sales.

In financial terms, Apple is running an exchange, while Google and Amazon are running a safety deposit service. If someone looks in the safety deposit and finds illegal items, you are caught. If someone looks in Apple's music locker, you only see Apple's AAC-encoded content (though I guess they didn't cover how that works with music that you didn't buy through Apple and they don't carry on iTunes).

2. I don't think they're giving you a license. You're supposed to already have a license for the song you already have. Apple is merely replacing a likely lower-quality copy with a higher-quality copy.

3. Doubtful (to the point that I almost said no). You aren't going to get immunity from prosecution, but I'm guessing that Apple isn't going to try too hard to find people that have pirated their collection and I think the music industry knows that. It isn't Apple's style (there's no product key on their OS, no activation on their products, etc.). They might do something that tries to figure out if it was a legitimately acquired track, but maybe they'll just go the "we can't match that track" route if it's flagged. Just like #2, you're going to be in the same license and legality position that you were in before.

This is a convenience measure - for you and Apple. For you, this syncs your music between all your computers/devices. For Apple, if they can match the tracks, they don't have to store all the extra tracks as duplicates on their storage. A syncing service wouldn't be useful to you if it only dealt with the music you bought from Apple. They know that it's only useful if it does all your music and so they created a matching service to be bandwidth, time and space efficient. The service costs money to create and run and so they're charging a small fee for it. It's highly doubtful that it will change anything on the legal end.

I know that is what was said, but its like saying "you just add extra water to your gas tank and you'll get mileage based on the number of gallons in your tank, whether or not its all gas."

The sentence construction is coherent but conceptually it doesn't pass the sniff test. Here is the rub.

"music that you own"

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last 20 years you know that there are two interpretations of this phrase. There is the consumer interpretation:

"I bought the CD at the store, I can do anything I want with it, copy it, transcode it, destroy it, use components in a playlist I've created, or use parts in my amateur video on squirrels."

There is the RIAA/Music Label interpretation:

"You don't own the music you own a piece of polycarbonate plastic which can reproduce the performance of the noted artist in an sanctioned playing device that has not been modified in any way. You and no more than 12 friends present, and who have not paid you any consideration for hearing said performance. Any other use is strictly and unequivocally forbidden."

For years, even though the record labels had no way to enforce their view of what you could and could not do with the music in your possession, they really haven't varied all that much in their opinion what rights they didn't give you.

So when you say "music you own" it reads like you have the consumer interpretation of that phrase, and yet Apple isn't a consumer, they are animated pile of cash which sells player devices, so it is incredulous to me that the music industry would simply "let" them do what you have described they are offering to do.

If you (and Apple) had instead said to take advantage of this services it is required that you go to an Apple store with your original CD, which would be photographed with you by an Apple employee where they would record your name, birth date, receipt or other information you brought along to prove you had acquired the CD legally, and a sample of your DNA. Then they would exchange your CD for a unique identifying code that you could apply to your iTunes account which would enable you to listen to that CD via iTunes on any device connected to iCloud but would not allow you to transfer the song from the iCloud for 'offline' playing.

If you told me that that was what Apple was offering I'd just nod my head and believe you.

iTunes Match sounds like a way for the labels to get finally get income from the music pirates who torrent stuff off of Pirate Bay. A share of the $25/year is better than the $0/year they're currently seeing.