Bloggers...they love to think they know how everything works and think their rants mean actual fact. It's why I despise them. Let me start from the top. I do not use the Apple Music service myself for various other reasons, but when I used it for the 3-month trial let me tell you...
First let me say that I agree with virtually everything you've said here, including the full post copied, but which in my post I have truncated simply for space. What I didn't see touched upon though, is the issue of original music that is basically Irreplaceable.
If this blogger did in fact have original music that he created himself, and that was saved in wave form (.WAV file format, a pure digital copy at a high sampling rate), and therefore was then absconded by Apple via their terms of agreement and Licensing with the music industry, he does have a legitimate gripe. Did he put the files in a place that would make them immediately accessible to Apple's iTunes, and inadvertently cause the problem himself? Well that's to be debated.
It sounds to me like iTunes is designed to scan your hard drive and find all music, then giving you the option at that point or prior to with an opt-in, to port that music over to the iTunes Cloud. If that is true, unless you're careful about it and not paying much attention to this process, you could fall victim to the same type of misappropriation of your own files that he did. Furthermore, now that those WAV files have been reduced to a lossy compression MP3 file, he has lost private tangible property. The tangible property is of course the lossless file, or basically a pure digital copy of the original creation.
Now he does go on to say that he was able to recover all of that data from a backup that he made himself, so his rant is really not all that that valuable except to make aware others who may not have backups such that they won't fall victim to the same process.
Personally, I have over 4000 CDs, yes the actual plastic discs with the digital information stored on them and for which I've paid my hard earned money to have the right to listen to anytime, as often, and wherever I chose and for as long into the future as I am able to safely store them in a usable fashion. Considering they are said have a 100 Year shelf life, that's effectively for the rest of my life and even perhaps for the rest of the life of my offspring. The CDs are stored in an archive closet. Am I a hoarder or a collector? I suppose that's up for debate as well.
I've taken the time to rip every single one of those CDs with the most accurate ripping tool available on the market, and then compressed the ripped files using FLAC, which is a lossless compression tool. The purpose for compressing was to minimize hard drive space using effectively about a 50% compression ratio. This is in contrast to an MP3 file which is closer to about a 10% ratio, meaning it tosses to the curb about 40% of the original data in the compression process, hence the term lossy compression. The CDs are both stored on physical hard drives, a NAS as well as on Google Drives (the cloud), so I can listen to them anywhere with Google Play Music.
So the choice of a lossless compression was to enable me to uncompress back to the original wav files if and when I should decide to do so, and once again have a pure digital copy of the original CD. That choice was also so that I could keep the CDs in their pristine condition and not risk damaging them via scratch or break, to ensure that they will be around in the future should I need to refer back to them.
Now of course, I still have all the original CDs so in the event that I should lose the digital copies of those CDs, I could still go back and rerip them however of course it would require extensive time and energy and effort as it did the first time around. So again, even though I have the originals, if I should lose the digital copies through a process like the one the Blogger describes I would have lost all of the time energy and effort that I put forth to rip them the first time meaning I would have been subject to a loss of at least one thing - an unrecoverable...time.
In a nutshell, we all have to be aware of our surroundings and protect ourselves from what we may not fully understand and from what contractual agreements we make ourselves subject to. This is a case of buyer beware gone wrong. Isn't the responsibility of the service provider to make us completely aware and make sure that we can make an intelligent decision that won't subject us to hurting ourselves? Well I would argue that yes it is the responsibility of Apple to make it clear to the consumer just what rights they may be giving up should they agree to the terms of this agreement. And I'm sure that the attorneys carefully worded the information in the disclosures such that they could be manipulated or interpreted to mean just about anything they need them to mean in order to protect Apple. They could have instead made it very blatantly clear.
I.e. "We will be deleting your data from your hard drive, and if that data is either original, one-of-a-kind, or of an unrecoverable nature, in other words you don't have backups, and if that data is stored in pure, uncompressed and lossless formats such as WAV, it will be permanently destroyed and converted to a lossy lossy format such as MP3 or AAC. Be sure to create a full backup of all data that you wish not to lose permanently. Proceed at your own risk."
The terms of agreement don't make it that clear and my argument would be that's a failure of their responsibility.
Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk