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

1. Yes, that seems to be what Apple is selling. "You had CDs that you ripped to MP3s with crappy quality a while ago. Pay us $25 and we'll trade your crappy-quality MP3s for 256k AACs."

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.

...and hands over your entire library to the music police.

It doesn't seem to be a license. It seems to be an agreement between Apple and the labels that basically allows for fair-use treatment. Basically, if you already own the songs, you have the license and you're just having Apple provide a convenience service for you - syncing your music to all your devices as high-quality 256k AAC files. You aren't getting a new license for them. You'll perpetually have the files, but it isn't something that will change your legal status.

I'm guessing one of the reasons the labels agreed to this is that it provides them with ammunition that what Apple is doing isn't fair-use. If it was fair-use, Apple wouldn't be paying the labels. Therefore, Amazon, et. al. need to pay the labels for such services too. It sets a precedent that the labels like.

A lot of youtube music content is not available on mobile devices.

Here's what I don't understand about your (and a lot of people's, I don't mean to pick on you) comments, please help me understand this:

Pirated files are not necessarily identifiable as such, not in the digital world. If I download some albums from what.cd, you can't tell they're pirated, maybe I ripped them with the exact same version of LAME. What I'm trying to say is that today, having a pirated file isn't a property of the file, it's a property of how you got ahold of that file.

I don't understand what you mean when you say the service "legitimizes" (paraphrase) existing music. All it does is exchange one set of bits for another set of bits, and this set of bits or that set of bits don't make an audio file legitimate or illegitimate.

I mean it's a bit like transcoding, isn't it? Except instead of doing it yourself, you're paying Apple to do it. The fact that a third party is providing the service doesn't necessarily mean that the process as a whole is legit, in the same way that taking a PDF of a book to FedEx Kinko's to print doesn't make the copy legit, in the same way that buying a Windows upgrade to upgrade your old pirated Windows doesn't make the resulting license legit.

I realize we're in kind of a special circumstance here because Apple has paid the music labels a lot of money, but we're just speculating about what the contents of their license enables them to do, which is probably only to be indemnified in the event that people use the service with pirated music (but not to indemnify the actual users).

Or am I missing something?