Music industry will force licenses on Amazon Cloud Player—or else

http://arstechnica.com/#!/media/news/2011/03/music-industry-will-force-licenses-on-amazon-cloud-playeror-else.ars

by evo_9 • 15 years ago

19 24 15 years ago

arstechnica.com

trotsky2• 15 years ago

If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.

- Admiral Grace Hopper

falcolas• 15 years ago

But much more expensive...

metabrew• 15 years ago

Not necessarily, with the amount of money the labels would want as a bribe^W"non recoupable advance" to sign the contract in the first place, after months of negotiating and nitpicking.

cal5k• 15 years ago

There was a brief period in history when recorded music was a money-printing business. Record once, sell over and over again around the world.

That period is over. The fact that the music industry is arguing over where and how you should be allowed to listen to a piece of digital music you paid for is the height of absurdity. Music is, by its very nature, a shared experience. It has always been thus throughout history. All of these arguments about "licensing", whether it's on the radio, streaming services, or in a cloud locker should be seen as what they are: a cash grab.

I personally and sincerely hope that record labels die out completely - I would not miss them one bit.

hsmyers• 15 years ago

Given the number of articles about NAS tech (new and old) I fail to see how what Amazon is offering is in any way different--- but then I'm not a lawyer. I firmly hope that Amazon takes this to court so that the issue of ownership can be established more clearly. Even if they were to lose, that would at least provide a target for legislative change.

alsocasey• 15 years ago

Precisely - I do this with a pogoplug already. Cloud player simply means higher uptime/reliability for me.

orky56• 15 years ago

Whenever companies try to innovate and expand the music listening experience, record companies are all over them. The record companies never take the first steps to improve things but are always the first to threaten legal action and get their fair share of new trends with music. Gross.

tomjen3• 15 years ago

They are loosing this battle and I doubt they will be around for much longer.

Now if only it was possible to hasten their demise (legally, there is no gloating in prison).

gizmani• 15 years ago

That's one reason why I haven't used Amazon Cloud Player yet. I'd rather wait a year or so to see how all this pans out before uploading massive amounts of "borrowed" mp3s...

killerdark• 15 years ago

After which you will upload your whole collection? Keep in mind that the free version has a 5GB limit and the "I bought an album from Amazon" version is 20GB.

I'm not sure what is going on, but I suspect this is a lawsuit honeypot of some sorts. Clearly the cloud player has very little practical value, that over time will diminish even further as storage costs keep dropping.

Raphael• 15 years ago

I wouldn't expect Amazon to rat people out. There is a small chance that in the future they stop accepting songs that appear to be borrowed.

jrockway• 15 years ago

I think Amazon is going to win this one. The RIAA can't even win cases against grandmas or John Does. I doubt that Amazon's legal team is going to be easier to beat.

(The key argument? "We just transfer the bits." The ISPs' routers don't need music licenses, why should S3?)

If Amazon loses, I hope the RIAA goes after AT&T next for all the music that's inevitably caught in their illegal wiretaps.

boredguy8• 15 years ago

Much will depend on A) the details of existing agreements between Amazon and labels; B) the details of Amazon's implementation.

It matters, for instance, if the cloud storage creates a unique file for each song a person uploads or if it creates 'efficiency' by pointing to a single file if you and I were to upload identical .mp3 files. It probably also matters if their online .mp3 auto-storage is moving a copy of the .mp3, or if it's only storing that you have a license to listen to that song.

These details will matter for determining if Amazon is actually offering storage or if they're actually offering streaming, if their existing agreements speak to streaming.

mrspandex• 15 years ago

This article mentions a Google product in development that would "scan a user's computer and automatically add any tracks that Google has licensed to that user's online locker" and an Apple product that would allow "unlimited music redownloads and streams to iOS devices" and then implies that since these would require licenses, so would Amazon.

I think there's a fine line that's crossed when you have to upload your own bits rather than re-use their bits.

jameshart• 15 years ago

The line gets even finer when you take an MD5 of your bits, look it up in a set of MD5s of bits they already have, and they say 'we already have those bits. No point wasting network capacity shipping them to us'...

Pahalial• 15 years ago

S3 explicitly does no deduplication at all, last I heard. This is somewhat corroborated by the pricing for cloud player - it would be a lot lower per GB if they did.

bradleyland• 15 years ago

I hope the RIAA challenges this to the highest court possible, because it would seem blindingly obvious to me that judges would rule in favor of the consumer in these scenarios. This is music that I've bought and paid for. The RIAA is taking this too far, and any sensible person can see that.

mhb• 15 years ago

What any sensible person can see is not always dispositive. Viz: the justification that the federal government can regulate essentially anything since it affects interstate commerce - http://reason.com/archives/2003/12/19/pot-luck

marcomonteiro2• 15 years ago

Can't we just start a startup to eliminate record labels entirely? Perhaps a YC for musicians?

threepointone• 15 years ago

Would be great. According to my buddies, CD Baby + iTunes is rather painless if you want to get your album out as an independent artist. The problem that has to be solved isn't so much getting the music to the market, but with associated costs and legwork like promotion, tours, associated expenses before you're profitable, etc. As an example, in India, Only Much Louder (http://oml.in/) is trying to fix this.

marcomonteiro2• 15 years ago

A few years ago we used CD Baby to distribute records right about the same time that they began offering digital distribution to the iTunes store. It was an awesome tool for us as an independent label. It sure beat consignment agreements with record stores.

Artist have a pain, record label greed and shady business practices. Amazon, Apple, etc. have a pain, record label greed and shady business practices. The question I have is how do people discover new music now? There was a time when radio airplay and MTV was a major contributor to a record's success but what ways are most effective today?

I wouldn't be surprised if those kinds of questions weren't Apple's reasoning behind Ping.

mayank• 15 years ago

This is a really old cartoon, but it's finally coming true. In many ways, this is the showdown a lot of us have been waiting for since Lars Ulrich went up on the stand:

http://www.caglecartoons.com/images/preview/%7Bac7d2177-a870...

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

I think that once again someone inside of Amazon understands the information economy pretty well. This does seem like a lawsuit 'honeypot' (talk about mixed metaphors) since it cannot help but provoke a response (see mp3.com [1])

The thing that confuses most people is the emerging doctrine of information sale. What the music companies would like to be true, is that selling you a CD (or an MP3) is equivalent to selling you a ticket to hear the performance once. And as you could not reasonably expect, having bought a ticket to a musical performance, to be able to change the venue for that performance, the industry would like to equate that absurd request to transliterating a recording into a different medium or access method.

Consumers on the other hand have expressed a strong belief that they "own" that instance of the music and that transliterating it, listening to it from different devices, and/or putting it on a mix tape and having it play as background music for their housewarming party are all 'well within their rights' of things they can do with what they own.

The legal tool is of course copyright and many cases have focused on what exactly does it mean to make a copy (which would have been more obvious had the original case against magnetic tape gone the way of the record labels) and what is fair use, and what is the greater good.

The motivating force is of course money. Given the physical challenges of having copies and even with tape carrying them around, the record labels were still able to extract a lot of money out of the system. With digital copies and network access it is a lot harder and they can see a time (or fear we are already in it) where the economics don't support the existence of a heavy weight 'middle man' in the music business.

Amazon is clearly positioning Cloud Drive with the assumption that the consumer's conceptual model (I bought it I can do what I want with it) is correct. The music companies will counter with "How can you know they bought it? Maybe they just borrowed it from the library?" Amazon has a stronger claim if they have a receipt (and its one that Apple uses with iTunes).

Best case, Amazon provokes a lawsuit that gives us a bit more clarity, worst case Amazon can only stream music from a Cloud Drive that you've purchased from the Amazon store (and perhaps to only a single IP address). It would not be a bad outcome (for Amazon) if lots of people were willing to re-license their music through Amazon's mp3 store.

Perhaps we should start a pool for when the last record label that existed prior to 2000 goes out of business. I strongly believe the outcome is inevitable, only the roughness of the journey is left to ascertain.

[1] http://techliberation.com/2006/04/19/why-the-mp3com-decision...

Music industry will force licenses on Amazon Cloud Player—or else

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