Song Clash Blog

APPLE founder Steve Jobs has emerged from his sickbed to announce a storage and delivery service that promises to upend the way people access information.

The service – iCloud – will enable people to access their music collections, photographs and other information available across multiple devices.

Users who take pictures with their iPhones, for example, will instantly be able to access the photos on their iPads.

The service will give users space on the company’s servers to store their iTunes libraries and beam them to any device – iPhone, iPad, iPod or computer. It also cuts the requirement for them to connect to a computer to use iTunes.

But some members of the music industry have criticised the service as a tool to legalise pirated music collections.

The overall service is free, but for an annual fee of just under $25 iTunes Match will scan users’ hard drives for music – including files obtained illegally, say some commentators – and match them to authorised tracks in Apple’s iTunes library, turning them into high quality versions.

iTunes Match is now offered to US users, but will be available to Australians once local licences have been signed.

Michael Speck, who ran the music industry’s landmark court case against file sharing network Kazaa and is now working on technologies to reduce piracy, said Apple was ”no better than the old p2p pirates”.

”Let me put it this way: if you can legally park your stolen car in my garage, will you rush out and actually pay for your own car?”

Nick O’Byrne, general manager of the Australian Independent Record Labels Association, said it would dramatically reduce income for the music industry.

”Why buy at full price when you can pirate as many songs as you like and absolve yourself of guilt by paying $25 a year?”

Apple will reportedly take 30 per cent of the $US24.95 fee and give the rest to the record labels.

Copyright law expert and senior lecturer at the University of Queensland Kimberlee Weatherall said that even if people pass their pirated music collections through iCloud they could still be targeted.

”You could still be sued for the act of downloading, which involves the making of an unauthorised copy not covered by any licenses Apple might have,” she said.

The iCloud service is similar to music lockers recently launched by Google and Amazon, but these are not fully supported by record labels and, unlike Apple’s offering, users are required to go through the lengthy process of uploading every song in their libraries.

Mr Jobs, who is believed to be suffering from complications after a liver transplant in late 2008, said that because of the proliferation of consumer tech gadgets, the system of storing music and video on one central device has ”broken down”.

”Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy,” he said. ”We’re going to demote the PC and Mac … We’re going to move the digital hub, the centre of your digital life, into the cloud.”

The speech was a victory of sorts for Mr Jobs, who for years has been talking about a future in which music, videos, books and pictures could be stored somewhere on the internet – ”the cloud” – and sent to a portable device wherever there is a mobile phone tower or a Wi-fi connection.

That world, as Jobs envisioned it, would throw out the PC, the platform his nemesis Bill Gates built his fortune on, and that Apple’s Macs could never quite compete with.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/national/no-silver-lining-warns-music-industry-as-icloud-lifts-off-20110607-1fr3v.html#ixzz1ObXJdfNK