When the latest batch of Apple software rolls out this fall, it very well could mark one of the first changes in the company’s anti-piracy strategy.
At the 2011 Worldwide Development Conference in San Francisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled his company’s flagship cloud-based storage software called “iCloud,” a revamped, enhanced iteration of the older product “MobileMe.”
“iCloud is a system that a lot of people have had before,” UCO tech store manager John Loudermill said. “(Apple) just used to charge you for it.”
Loudermill explained that iCloud will be a remote storage system that could eliminate the need for an external hard drive, as well as provide multiple entry points to data that users might need to access.
Some aspects of iCloud will not be entirely compatible with Windows users, however; they will have to have iTunes accounts to utilize parts of the cloud.
“iTunes is sort of a gap-bridger,” Loudermill said. “When you get certain products which are in the cloud, which are your iPhones, your iPod touches, your regular iPods and your iPads — these are cloud items. These are things that are outside of the Mac that are designed to work with a PC or any type of situation you have going on.”
According to Loudermill, the iCloud would also allow users to access it from a PC in order to retrieve Windows-compatible documents.
Another feature that came with the announcement of the iCloud service was iTunes Match. For an annual fee of $25, users will give permission to Apple to scan their computers for ripped music, and replace it with a copy from iTunes’ 18 million-song library in their own format with ostensibly no questions asked.
In an article on the tech site ZDNet, blogger David Gewirtz wondered whether Apple had just offered complete amnesty to music pirates, and called iTunes Match a “curious, interesting, and dare I say it? elegant solution to the pirated music problem.”
“Basically, the idea is that iTunes Match will scan your existing music library of ripped MP3s, and match them against their library of 18 million or so authorized music tracks,” Gewirtz wrote. “Those ripped (which could have been pirated) MP3s of yours, if they match, will be replaced in the iCloud with official, licensed (music).”
Some are concerned about possible privacy issues related to iTunes Match.
“As with any automated system or system navigated by a human being, there could be possible errors, definitely (there are) concerns as to what files they’re taking out,” Loudermill said. “These types of things could pose a problem; I’m not really sure what provisions they have in place to differentiate things that may or may not look pirated, and how they excluded that from the rest of your data.”
It’s possible, according to Loudermill, that iTunes Match would only look for files that aren’t in the AAC format and convert them, rather than picking and choosing from files that may or may not be pirated.
The iCloud service, along with the latest builds of Mac OS X and iOS, will be released later this fall; currently, an iTunes-only beta version of iCloud is available in the United States.