Comment by billybob

No, I see your point. I guess it's an open question for me whether this is a transcoding service or a music license.

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.