Comment by ChuckMcM
15 years ago
This was the curious bit for me as well. So for $25 all my music 'upgrades' to 256 bit AAC, can I replace the MP3's I ripped with 128bit MusicMatchJukebox in '99 and are sitting on my filer?
And what is this $25 really paying for? Is Apple empowered by the labels to license me a DRM free digital copy?
If I pay the $25 annual fee will it automatically 'upgrade' any songs that come on over a torrent link? Is this really a one time license to every single song in the iTunes store? (Seriously, there is probably an mp3 or ogg file of every song in the iTunes library out there) If I put them all on my machine and then pay my $25 does it go 'ding' and now I own a legitmate digital copy? (if so its a screamin' good deal)
Can I get immunity from prosecution by this? I mean if I've got the insta-legit card in my iTunes and a metallica song comes across the intertubes and metallica comes calling can I just show them the itunes copy?
It's a bold move, and one which I support, but I wonder how its going to look once its put into practice.
My guess, is that if you have a $25 subscription you can put a CD into your Mac and it will 'register' those songs as being available to you. But we will see, could be very very interesting. Or not.
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.
"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."
This is the curious bit. The music companies have argued in the past that I didn't get a license to convert my audio into digital form (aka rip an MP3) when I bought my CDs. So your postulate that 'you already have a license' would not be valid to a company that held I didn't get any rights other than the court stipulated 'archive copy'.
Anyway, I don't know one way or the other. But I have seen other companies take a similar approach unsuccessfully, and its interesting to see how Apple is moving the conversation about digital media along.
Since it would be possible to keep a non-DRM copy in perpetuity on disk, I'm really curious about how this will implement. It seems on its face to be something the music industry is currently very invested in preventing. And frankly I don't think 150M$ + some fraction of $25 one time from iCloud subscribers is going to cut it for them.