Extra revenue stream for Apple: sell the database of which users pirated which songs to the RIAA so they can sue.
One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year
91–100 of 106 posts
Re: One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year
#92Is this perpetual? For example, could I pay my yearly subscription fee, torrent anything I want, upload it and get a legit version? If so, this is $25 a year for all the music I want. Which, if the labels have agreed to that, it's very surprising. It's sort of a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" strategy: they start getting a cut of this fee from every participating pirate, which is a lot more than they used to get (…
Torrenting those files will still be illegal and that doesn’t change after you sign up for this service and pay. It’s not an amnesty. (Also: Pirates are usually not caught by looking at the files they have on their HDD. Whether you have the original torrented files or Apple’s music files around doesn’t make a difference.) You can get those pirated files in slightly better quality and you won’t have to upload them to…
True, but if you 'convert' a large collection today, then you skip the possibility that Apple will implement anti-piracy features in the future. With Amazon and Google, no one can really be sure what the status is right now. Especially since you are uploading bit-for-bit copies of the files to those cloud services.
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).
Re: One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are other reasons for using lossless audio files, such as archiving, and avoiding degradation through re-encoding.
also disks are cheap, and flac amounts to a digital copy of the physical CD. You could decode it to the original WAV files from the CD if you wanted to
> flac amounts to a digital copy of the physical CD
Re: One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. Once you have a receipt from Apple, you have documentation that you used Apple's transcoding service. If you accidentally lost 2TB worth of CDs between that time and the seizure of your PC, you're still going to have some explaining to do.
It would be like presuming guilt, you don't have to prove those mp3s are legal they have to prove that you stole them. Also having mp3s isn't the same as distributing mp3s. tptacek is right I believe. As far as I understand it, every p2p case has been about distribution or suspicion of distribution (make available argument). And they have to have a reason to come scan your computer. Hence why I won't be using this "s…
In a civil prosecution (which is how copyright violation ought normally be handled, particularly at the individual consumer level) the burden of proof is usually only "the balance of probabilities" (i.e. more likely to be true than not be true), not "beyond a reasonable doubt".
(Of course, media companies would prefer that the government pass laws, pay for and implement the job of enforcing media company contracts, and this muddies the waters.)
Re: One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year
#95This is pretty awesome! It means I can access legally purchased and ripped CD collection via iCloud. I'd happily pay $25/year for that convenience (even though I don't buy CDs anymore, it's all iTunes).
Re: One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
also disks are cheap, and flac amounts to a digital copy of the physical CD. You could decode it to the original WAV files from the CD if you wanted to
> flac amounts to a digital copy of the physical CD So long as your CD doesn't include any square waves, you're golden.
> So long as your CD doesn't include any square waves, you're golden.
Could you explain what you mean by this? Are you referring to certain patterns that fall within standard Redbook audio parameters that FLAC then fails to encode properly? Or perhaps to characteristics of CDs or CD playback equipment that are difficult to duplicate on modern-day computers? I can imagine something like preëmphasis being problematic sometimes, but that seems to have little to do with square waves.
Re: One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that I'll be paying $25 for a blanket validation of my music collection. Once the payment is made, I'm as good as gold. At a substantial discount.
The question remains if you are only "gold" as long as you pay your $25/year. Once you stop, does your newly acquired goldness go away?
No idea, but if you were at the Keynote today, you would have seen the obvious, "nudge nudge, wink wink" in Steve's eyes.
Re: One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 prop…
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. Except that once you use iTunes Match, the resulting audio files are legally lice…
That's a huge assumption that I doubt very much will survive the EULA you'd need to agree to in order to use iTunes Match. It seems unlikely that the labels have licensed Apple to run the world's biggest pirated-music-laundering service.
Re: One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question remains if you are only "gold" as long as you pay your $25/year. Once you stop, does your newly acquired goldness go away?
No idea, but if you were at the Keynote today, you would have seen the obvious, "nudge nudge, wink wink" in Steve's eyes.
Again, the deal brokered with the music industry equates amnesty. There is no simpler way to look at it. Unlike your Flickr account, for example, you still retain purchase rights after your yearly account expires. The way I see it, that's acquiescence by the labels, via a third party, that you in fact have paid for that music, with the added benefit of an upgrade by a licensed partner. As if you handed Apple a list of music, no matter how big or distributed, that you'd like to own. Granted, under the conditions of their license agreement, but on an average .10% of the cost of the license per song (assuming 25,000 mp3's), shit man, you'd be soft not to take the offer at least once and upgrade your current library forever.
Forever, you say? Once you pay for something, regardless of the amount, it's yours.
Re: One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year
#100How is this different than what mp3.com was trying to do about 5 year ago (I think it was mp3.com)? I seem to remember them having a service where you could put a CD into your disk drive, have their service recognize the CD and all of the sudden, you had the MP3s.
I'm guessing it is b/c this is 5 years later and b/c of Apple's clout, but I could also be missing some nuance.