Apple’s iMatch feature is their answer to Google Music and Amazon Cloud Drive in terms of the management of music libraries. Firstly, iCloud means that any music you have bought from the iTunes Store in the past or future will automatically be available for your other devices: whether that’s a PC running Windows Vista (but not XP), a Macbook, an iPad or an iPhone.

Apple managed to secure what Google and Amazon could not: agreements with the major music labels. Most interestingly, for $24.99 a year (only available in the U.S for now), iMatch will scan your existing iTunes library for music you haven’t purchased from iTunes. It matches those songs with their equivalents in the iTunes Store and automatically adds the 256kbps iTunes version to your iCloud library. If no match is found, you can upload the song to the cloud yourself. The number of unmatched songs you can upload is limited to 25,000.

Reaction to iMatch was mixed. Many commentators seemed disappointed that the iCloud didn’t instantly revolutionise our entertainment habits. Apple are not offering a music streaming service to rival the likes of Spotify, rather they are offering fancy synchronisation of your existing music collection. While it’s true that with major label support and a catalogue of 18 million songs, iTunes would be the ultimate streaming service, that is not within the interests of Apple. Their modus operandi is to sell more of their iOS devices.

Others said that iMatch legitimises piracy. Is that a bad thing? These illegally-downloaded songs already exist on a person’s hard-drive so maybe this amnesty of sorts will create a new dependency on iTunes and change downloading habits.

As for the music makers and copyright holders, there should be no complaints. What iMatch’s license fee enables Apple to do, is to pay the rights owners of a song which was never paid for in the first place. Let me say that again – Apple is giving you free money for previously-acquired illegal downloads. And that also applies to MP3 rips from a CD legally bought in a shop. You’re getting paid TWICE. Sounds like a win win to me.

It seems the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have already recognised this and have actually produced a cirriculum for teaching respect for intellectual property and responsible use of the internet to school children.

It’s called Music Rules! and its website claims it “informs students about the laws of copyright and the risks of online file-sharing, while promoting musical and artistic creativity”.

It offers teachers and parents free materials from its site which includes activity sheets to make kids think about the effects of downloading. They range from asking the student to write down what a singer, producer or DJ would say about the effects of “songlifting” to asking them to interview friends and family about where they got their music and put the results in a chart. By the end of the cirriculum, students sign a pledge to never download music and to respect intellectual copyright law.

Naturally, there has been a huge number of critics of Music Rules! with groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation calling it a propaganda effort. The EFF also points to a number of inaccuracies in the material such as the activity which asks students to calculate the price of downloading a song, making the assumption that an illegal download equals a lost sale.

More blatantly though, it points to an activity in which the students are asked to start an anti-piracy campaign in their community and to contact local newspapers and TV stations to get their message heard, an activity which the EFF says turns students into RIAA’s “own unpaid public relations staff”.

In response, the EFF have produced an alternative cirriculum called Teaching Copyright which they say focuses on teaching the students their digital rights rather than telling them what not to do.

There’s also another alternative in cartoon form made by ASCAP (The American Society of songwriters, composers and music publishers) called Donny The Downloader in which Donny downloads some music from “Half-Dollar” (ahem) and gets told off by a cheerleader who blames his downloading for getting her mom fired.

So far, the Youtube trailer has racked up a measly 11 views, which maybe highlights how interesting this material is for the kids more than anything else.

As part of the FAC (Featured Artists Coalition), a team of musicians including Billy Bragg, Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason and Blur’s Dave Rowntree have criticised Mandelson’s plans with Mason quoted as saying “The last thing we want to be doing is going to war with our fanbase. File-sharing means a new generation of fans for us”.

As pointed out though by Lily Allen on her myspace blog , that’s all well and good for established artists like Pink Floyd, Radiohead and Blur but what about emerging artists? Allen’s thoughts are perhaps more realistic as they reflect a more recent successful artist who knows she’s lucky to have paid off her record company advance. Ms. Allen also quite rightly reasons that as record company bosses “start to lose big from piracy, they’re not slashing their salaries – they’re pulling what they invest in A&R,” meaning less room for development and less room for new acts. Her blog sparked replies from both Matt Bellamy of Muse and James Blunt, neither who agreed with her point of view entirely. Allen has since set up a blog at http://idontwanttochangetheworld.blogspot.com to post her fellow artists reactions to her post (which she’s now deleted due to insulting comments).

Ultimately, the problem as I see it, is that the youth of today have been using file-sharing sites and programs adeptly for nigh-on ten years with reprimand. When you’ve been downloading music for free since you were 12 years old, why would you suddenly start paying for it now?

Services like Spotify are brilliant and all but young people largely aren’t willing to use their parent’s credit card to pay for a subscription when they can get the ad-supported version for free or download the MP3 for nothing. Most young people don’t care about copyright or how artists make a living. How can musicians change listening habits when they spend more time bickering amongst themselves?

Deep down, we all know artists have to be paid for their creativity but how continues to be a perplexing and wildly divisive issue. The seeds of free have already been sown but the younger generations will not give it up easily.

The leaked version is said to be a rough cut of the film with missing special effects, temporary music and sound. A slideshow of images from the movie shows scenes lacking full CGI, action sequences with stunt ropes and green screens clearly visible.

20th Century Fox were understandably panicked that their estimated $130 million summer flick was now publicly available and issued a war cry statement saying that source of the leak “will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law”. They proceeded to get the FBI involved in finding the source of the leak. A raid on a data server centre where millions of dollars in computer equipment was seized without proper explanation turned out to be unrelated but certainly helped fueled the fallout. Three men have now said to be charged in connection with the leak but that is unconfirmed at time of press.

Elsewhere, film critic Roger Friedman downloaded and reviewed the unfinished copy of the movie, bragging rather unctuously about the ease he could download pirated movies. Friedman who worked for Fox 411, a subsidiary of News Corp (who also own 20st Century Fox) for 10 years was unsurprisingly let go from his position last Friday and his review was removed from the site. Talk about biting the hand that feeds.

Versions of movies leak onto the net all the time but a film with such a massive budget leaking in such high-quality, a full month in advance is unprecedented. The music industry has had to deal with leaks like this for years yet the movie industry is usually a lot more secure though films copied from advance review (screeners) and versions recorded discreetly in the cinema (cams) do turn up in their droves on the net.

Initial estimated download figures were placed at 75,000 in the first few hours of the leak but that’s sure to be closer to at least the million mark by now. All movie industry eyes will be on the numbers X-Men Origins collects in the opening few weeks to gauge what effect such massive download numbers have had on box office takings.