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Comment by klous | Hacker News Reader

iTunes Match premise: Once a pirate, not always a pirate. Pirates are willing to pay $25 / yr for legit 256 kbps AAC tracks of stuff they already have? And you must keep paying $25/yr in perpetuity for access to these tracks?

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This should actually be really attractive to pirates. You know all those albums you downloaded, but could only find in 128 kbps? Well, spend $25, and all those can now be 256 kbps. I absolutely loathe iTunes, and that's attractive enough to me that I'm considering reinstalling it.

Or maybe just make file system objects that appear to be songs?

It seems to be using perceptual hashing to match tracks; you'd need to find actual crappy versions of the songs you want.

I doubt that there would be many albums that are not available at at least 256kbps from various file-sharing networks. A pirate would have to first search their favourite file sharing network anyway to get the music they then have to pay Apple to listen to.

So Apple’s basically betting you’ll pay $25 a year to legalize all your content[…]

I really don't like the part about legalizing my collection. The music I ripped and encoded myself from hundreds of CDs that I bought retail are just as legal as tracks from iTunes.

Your music is already legal. Not sure what you don't like about the "legalizing" aspect, as it doesn't pertain to 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.

This just sounds surreal.

So instead of buying music, you can now "pirate" it, then allow iTunes Match to "legitimize it" for you.

Bingo, free "legitimate" music (I assume with artwork/etc included).

I suppose its possible that all of the music in torrents has been finger printed in some way or another which would identify it. Unlikely though.

Even better: Hack the iTunes Match service to let it think you have MP3s, that you don't even have on your system. Bam, instant free access to all music on iTunes. (well almost free)

It lets you redownload them in 256 Kbps AAC with no DRM. How can it make you keep paying to retain access?

Access to the tracks on the cloud server. It's not like they're being deleted from your hard drive.

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