Music Industry Cries Foul Over Amazon Cloud Player

[dgstorm]

Yesterday, hookbill, brought us a great story regarding Amazon's new Cloud Streaming Media Service. It is such a great product that it obviously has generated a lot of interest.

It apparently has raised a lot of "ire" as well, at least from the music industry. The news of Amazon's "music locker" service came screaming from out of nowhere, as Google and iTunes have been trying to start this type of service for quite some time now.

It begs the question... how did Amazon beat these two behemoths to the punch? The answer is that Amazon didn't get the proper licensing to begin the service, which has been what has held up Google and iTunes all this time. Also, it appears that Amazon didn't even bother to contact the record labels about the service launch before hand either. In fact, industry speculation is that Google will launch their version sometime in May and iTunes will follow suit sometime in June.

The real problem though is the music industry. One example is that Amazon's new free cloud player service competes directly with Sony's "Music Unlimited" subscription based service. Sony Music's spokeswoman Liz Young, had this to say,

"We hope that they'll reach a new license deal," Young said, "but we're keeping all of our legal options open."

That seems like a thinly veiled threat. Also, an executive involved in the negotiations, who requested anonymity, commented that the move was,

"somewhat stunning," and further added, "I've never seen a company of their size make an announcement, launch a service and simultaneously say they're trying to get licenses."

Amazon's response to all this hullabaloo was,

"Cloud Player is an application that lets customers manage and play their own music. It's like any number of existing media management applications. We do not need a license to make Cloud Player available. The functionality of saving MP3s to Cloud Drive is the same as if a customer were to save their music to an external hard drive or even iTunes."

That seems like a fairly confident stance for them to take. Of course, what we are seeing here is the growing pains of the natural evolution of the way music and other digital media will be handled in the future. Although we are likely to see a rash of lawsuits, it is likely that Amazon will be able to weather this storm and come out with the first "music locker" service to compete in the digital media market of the future.

Source: Android.net via Engadget and Yahoo! - Reuters

 

[fish1552]

This sounds to me like a case of the music industry STILL not waking up to the fact that technology is changing the rules of everything. They don't seem to understand that cloud storage is nothing more than a personal hard drive on the internet. So a person buys music, stores it here and they have legally purchased the music for personal use. They aren't losing any money.

And they wonder why piracy is such a problem to this day.....

 

[hookbill]

What the music industry wants is for you to lose your music so you will have to purchase it again. I mean if I think back I've purchased some albums as many as 5 times. What jerks.

 

[dafischman]

I agree, the music industry has been behind on technology advances for years now. They are scratching and clawing at ways to protect the "old way" of doing things. I agree with Amazon's perspective, they are providing a customer an external hard drive located on Amazon's, server to store their music. Then they are providing a media player in their "cloud" that can access the said music, no different than any media player on my computer can access my music on one of my external harddrives.

Josh

 

[techRob]

I agree, the music industry has been behind on technology advances for years now. They are scratching and clawing at ways to protect the "old way" of doing things. I agree with Amazon's perspective, they are providing a customer an external hard drive located on Amazon's, server to store their music. Then they are providing a media player in their "cloud" that can access the said music, no different than any media player on my computer can access my music on one of my external harddrives.

Josh

Yes. Exactly

 

[ilikemoneygreen]

Amazon sounds reasonable to me. Maybe the other companies are just trying to make this sound bad. Competitors are just upset.

 

[jroc]

Yea I really see nothing for the record labels to be upset about. There are theories about logins being shared but they are really nonsense to me.

Instead of doing all that with Amazon I would use something else.

 

[xan]

if sony is upset it must be really cool.

-hey sony when you sending me a check for those rotted discs, broken cassette tapes and my unviewable betamax collection?

 

[sidsixseven]

It's a pretty well established precedent that you are allowed to make copies of your own legally purchased copyrighted material provided that it doesn't circumvent DRM. Even here, the copyright violation is the circumvention of the DRM and not the actual copying.

I think it will be damn hard for the labels to win this one in court. And even harder against a company the size of Amazon who have the resources and expertise on technology to make the case. Whereas, the labels are just reacting to what -- we didn't say you could do THAT with your music.

 

[sidsixseven]

It occured to me that the Amazon Cloud Player could actually be a good thing for record labels to find illegally obtained music. From the end user agreement:

5.2. Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files: to provide you with technical support and address technical issues; to investigate compliance with the terms of this Agreement, enforce the terms of this Agreement and protect the Service and its users from fraud or security threats; or as we determine is necessary to provide the Service or comply with applicable law.

As pointed out in this ComputerWorld article, "Amazon won't put up a fight should the RIAA start poking around."

 

[jroc]

^ See, very good point.

I think the ppl that get music illegally wont be using Amazon anyway.

 

[REMilk]

Every bit of digitized music I have have on Amazon Cloud Drive, Dropbox, my Droid, and my PC is music that I purchased. Yes, some of these I digitized from LPs I purchased in the 60s and 70's, some are from digitized cassettes and some I have purchased as mp3.

I have the receipts for the mp3s or the original source, LP or cassette, for all I digitized. Since the Amazon Cloud is for my own use, I feel, though the RIAA and the recording industry bwill argue otherwise, that I am within the spirit of the law. I do not share or distribute anything from my personal music library.

Just my own not-so-humble opinion.

 

[thedroidmonkey]

whats the difference in mp3tunes.com and amazon's cloud? mp3 tunes has a player and a 2GB locker for you to store your music with a 10GB upgrade all for free. ive had this app for about 3 months now and it works like a dream. why is amazons app making all the noise with only a 5GB locker?

am i missing something?

 

[REMilk]

Another Alternative

whats the difference in mp3tunes.com and amazon's cloud? mp3 tunes has a player and a 2GB locker for you to store your music with a 10GB upgrade all for free. ive had this app for about 3 months now and it works like a dream. why is amazons app making all the noise with only a 5GB locker?

am i missing something?

Thank you for bringing mp3tunes.com to my attention and to the attention of others. I was not aware of this service and will investigate it further

With "referrals" you can have up to 10GB for free. I see this as another alternative for storing music and other docs in the cloud!

Bob

 

[REMilk]

mp3tunes.com is Being sued by EMI

whats the difference in mp3tunes.com and amazon's cloud? mp3 tunes has a player and a 2GB locker for you to store your music with a 10GB upgrade all for free. ive had this app for about 3 months now and it works like a dream. why is amazons app making all the noise with only a 5GB locker?

am i missing something?

EMI is suing mp3tunes.com as they have not fully locked down the access to the owner. It may be possible for others to access an individual's music files on mp3tunes.com as mp3tunes.com has a published APIs that may be exploited for open access.

Amazon did not publish any API and has "Terms of Agreements" that prohibit file sharing.