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

[Kim Holburn]

An interesting technology.  Can people store to and stream (ie listen to) music they have bought/licensed from the cloud?  Will the music industry allow it or do they see dollars and want people to pay even more for this right.

Theft or not?

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

> Music industry will force licenses on Amazon Cloud Player—or else
> 
> By Jacqui Cheng | Last updated about 13 hours ago
>        
> Amazon's decision to launch its new Cloud Player without securing additional music licenses has been described as a "bold move" by many observers. It takes serious guts for Amazon to simply declare that it doesn't need licenses—especially when even casual observers know the music industry thinks otherwise. Still, this isn't a one-dimensional issue, and the law has yet to deal much with services like Amazon's. Record companies fantasize about huge revenues from streaming services, and they fear digital lockers like the plague.
> 
> If the record labels don't come to a licensing agreement with Amazon soon, they will either be forced to take legal action or implicitly allow other music companies to ditch cloud licenses too. 
> 
> Amazon v. the music industry
> 
> Amazon launched two new services, Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, earlier this week. US-based Amazon customers can get free online storage from Amazon to use for whatever they please, but users are heavily encouraged to upload their local music libraries. All Amazon MP3 purchases are automatically synced to the user's Cloud Drive without counting against the quota, too. Once the music is copied to the remote drive, users can then use the Cloud Player Android or Web app to stream the music to any compatible device or browser, even if the files themselves had not been synced there.
> 
> Both Apple and Google are expected to launch very similar services in the future, but neither has made an announcement. Google's music service is rumored to offer both music downloads and streams to go with its own digital locker—the service would scan a user's computer and automatically add any tracks that Google has licensed to that user's online locker. Apple's may involve unlimited music redownloads and streams to iOS devices as part of a MobileMe revamp, and Apple is currently believed to be in talks with the Big Four music labels—Sony Music, Universal Music Group (UMG), Warner Music Group (WMG), and EMI—to make it happen.
> 
> If Apple and Google are dutifully trying to hammer out licensing deals, why did Amazon go ahead and launch Cloud Player without them? Amazon argues that Cloud Drive and Cloud Player are just services that let users upload and play back their own music, just like "any number of existing media management applications." After all, licenses shouldn't be necessary for users to play their own music, right? The labels seem to disagree—they expressed shock following Amazon's announcement, with a Sony Music spokesperson implying that the company was looking into legal options.
> 
> But are licenses required for users to play back music that they have legally purchased, even if that playback is coming from "the  cloud?"
> 
> Unchartered territory
> 
> "The word 'streaming' and the word 'download' are nowhere in copyright law," MP3tunes' CEO Michael Robertson told Ars. "It may be a very logical, common sense position, but all that matters is what the law says. Can you store your own music? Can you listen from anywhere? What if your wife or kids want to listen to it? All those things are completely unchartered territory."

......

> However, those licenses may be for a slightly different purpose. Amazon is reportedly considering a feature that would let users upload their music libraries and stream that music to friends, but only if a particular song is also in Amazon's database of songs-acceptable-to-stream-to-others. "Songs not recognized by the system would still be uploaded and maintained as unique copies," writes the Journal, who claims that Amazon is trying to wrap up such negotiations in a matter of weeks.
> 
> (Howell takes issue with the Journal's assertion that "intellectual property experts agree" Amazon's situation is covered by the Supreme Court's 2009 decision on Cablevision—it said that Cablevision DVRs could make a copy to centralized servers as long as a local copy remained on the customer's device. "Here, users will be uploading files they downloaded per Amazon's MP3 music service to S3, then accessing the uploaded material from different locations and devices," she told us. "It's a sufficiently distinguishable use case that it's reckless to suggest Amazon would be shielded by the Cablevision decision.")
> 
> If that deal is enough to placate the record labels, then that's relatively good news for the rest of us. It could mean that regular users would (theoretically) upload their own music libraries and stream it to themselves, while streaming cloud-licensed songs to their friends. Not the most ideal option in the world, but still pretty good considering the alternative:
> 
> "The record labels believe a cloud license is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, over the next decade," Robertson told us. "And, the record labels are really infatuated with the notion that cloud lockers are going to be used for pirating."
> 
> As long as media companies think of file lockers as piracy devices, they will be at war with them. If Amazon is able to convince these companies that file lockers really are file lockers—and that royalties will be there if the music is streamed to someone else—we could eventually find ourselves with more (and better) storage and streaming options.
> 
> On a closing note, Howell observed that Amazon MP3's terms of service are worded quite differently than, say, iTunes' terms of service.
> 
> "It's interesting to note that Amazon tells users of its MP3 music download service they have the right to 'copy, store, transfer and burn the Digital Content only for [their] personal, non-commercial, entertainment use.' Though they may sound benign, those are some pretty broad and potentially controversial assertions," she said. "Perhaps Amazon has been positioning itself, in anticipation of this new service, to argue users do indeed have all these rights in their digital music?"



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Kim Holburn
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