Gaming the Apple iCloud – will it increase music piracy?
This is an idle thought, and they’ve probably thought this through… but I wonder if the way that Apple’s iTunes Match service works is an incentive for lots of people who weren’t music pirates to become so?
As I understand it, iTunes Match scans your iTunes for all music, and any it finds that you didn’t buy through iTunes it will save for your in the cloud for $25 per year (or £164 per month as I’m sure it’ll be in the UK).
So it’s an amnesty; we don’t care where you got it, but for a small fee per year, we’ll just overlook that, and you can have a clean, legal music collection.
HOWEVER…
Your incentive is now based on laundering as much music as you can get your hands on through the Apple Amnesty. If you don’t have much, or indeed anything at all, in terms of pirated music… well, you’re not getting value for money, are you?
So why not just add a few albums in here and there; download them from a torrent site, and rinse them clean through iTunes Match?
And why just a few… Why not LOTS? You can see the appeal in downloading 4Gb batches of “1001 all time great albums”… because wince it’s through the laundering service, it’s yours forever.
The system seems set up to encourage people to turn pirate before claiming amnesty.
Which probably wasn’t the intention, but may be the consequence…