Jun 7 2011
iTunes Match @ 24.99 a Pirates Amnesty?
Phillip Elmer-Dewitt over at CNN Money writes about Apple’s upcoming iTunes Match feature and it’s ability to give those who pirated music a way to upgrade the quality of their music to sanctioned 256k AAC music files. He is technically correct, if a user stole their music and used iTunes Match, then it would fix them up with better quality files than what they may have pirated off the internet. Probably a few music exec’s are having a collective apoplexy right now after realizing what they just gave away for 24.99 a year.
On the other hand, if iTunes replaces those songs of an active pirate, then if they share those songs out, there’s a paper trail because their itunes account information is embedded into the files.