The iTunes Match feature of Apple’s iCloud music service will help illegal file sharers, an Australian lawyer claims.

The iTunes Match service, which has been priced at US$24.99 a year, will identify and index songs on the hard drive of a subscriber, find those songs in a library of 18 million songs available through iTunes, and add those songs to the user’s iCloud account.

The Matched songs on the iCloud will be legitimate as they will come with a license, and the user gets the right to play the songs from his/her iCloud account on as many as ten devices.

But, in doing so the Apple’s service doesn’t care to confirm whether the songs on a user’s hard drive are legitimate or pirated ones.

Criticizing the service as “legitimizing piracy”, Australian lawyer Ken Philip said, “You could get rid of all your pirated versions of tracks that match Apple’s collection.”

Any songs on the user’s computer hard drive that don't match up with content on iTunes will soon be uploaded & stored to allow users to access them on the move.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who on Monday unveiled the iCloud storage system at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2011 in San Francisco, described the iTunes Match as an “industry leading offer”