Did Apple just announce complete music pirate amnesty for $24.95?
snip
Those ripped (which could have been pirated) MP3s of yours, if they match, will be replaced in the iCloud with official, licensed 256Kbps AAC — without DRM.
So, the idea is that you pay Apple $24.95 a year, they scan your old music collection, upgrade all your pirated/ripped tracks, and give you back legitimate music.
http://gigaom.com/2011/06/08/apple-icloud-drm/
Sure looks that way, doesn't it? All it cost Apple is $150 million and 70% of the take. I suspect that Apple's pitch to the record labels went along the lines of "something is better than nothing, and a couple hundred million dollars is a lot of something."
I think iTunes in the Cloud will have huge numbers for its first year. $25 is a small price to pay to get a quality upgrade on thousands of tracks, even if you just have them on one computer and one iPod and won't get much out of the cloud functions. Even for the tracks that I ripped from CD at 128K about a decade ago, when I didn't know better and hard drive space was scarce, $25 is a bargain compared to the hassle of re-ripping discs, deleting the old ones, and then having to rebuild my playlists.
There will likely be a drop-off after that, as the dedicated music pirates launder and re-download their tracks and have no further need for it. But I think there will be enough users to make it an ongoing profit center for both Apple and the labels. If Apple just breaks even, it differentiates iDevices and the iTunes store in a useful way.
So, the idea is that you pay Apple $24.95 a year, they scan your old music collection, upgrade all your pirated/ripped tracks, and give you back legitimate music.
Under the strict letter of the law, I suspect your upgraded pirated tracks are still not entirely legit. But there would be no way to prove it.