My amazon cloud music license#
My amazon cloud music download#

Supreme Court to confirm, in the face of our copyright laws and the protections they give content owners, that personal video recorders were legal.' 'If Amazon can launch its service with no licenses, then Apple and Google would be fools to get licenses because they'd be at a cost disadvantage,' Robertson said. 'Though the legality of cloud storage and remote access to items already purchased make intuitive sense, I suspect it will take similarly definitive and hard-fought judicial pronouncements to bullet-proof such a business model without specific licensing in place.' Supreme Court to confirm, in the face of our copyright laws and the protections they give content owners, that personal video recorders were legal,' Howell said. 'Of course, not many music customers have the technical chops to achieve that perfect marriage of Lacie drive and Sonos.' But she says it's not worth the recording industry's time to go after the little guys.Īmazon, however, is a different story, and it could take years of legal skirmishes before figuring out whether Amazon's bold statement is correct. Howell pointed out that many self-identified geeks have been doing something similar on their own for ages. 'All were or have been wrapped up in years of litigation over the same essential issue: to what extent is it permissible to allow consumers to time, place and/or device-shift 'their' media?' ' response as quoted in your piece could have been asserted by MP3.com, Kaleidescape, Slingbox, and of course Robertson's new MP3tunes,' Howell told Ars. Intellectual property lawyer and This Week in Law host Denise Howell generally agrees with Robertson's assessment. This gives the record labels a new area of attack that goes beyond the lawsuit with MP3tunes.'

My amazon cloud music download#

They're specifically prohibited from allowing people to download multiple times, but that's what Amazon is doing with its new setup. 'Why is that? Because that's what their contracts say.

Robertson went on to explain that Amazon has likely agreed not to allow, for example, music redownloads after a user has purchased a song (a complaint that often crops up about music purchased from the iTunes Store as well).

My amazon cloud music license#

'This means they've entered into a license with all the major record labels to sell music, but these licenses have certain restrictions - things Amazon can and can't do, and things they've agreed they won't do.' 'Unlike us, Amazon is also a music retailer,' Robertson said. If you think that sounds a lot like Amazon Cloud Player, you'd be right - the services offer many of the same features - though Robertson pointed out that Amazon may actually be in an even tighter spot than MP3tunes when it comes to licensing. His current company allows users to upload music to the site's lockers, allowing them to listen to that music anywhere they can access the site. 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 uncharted territory.' 'It may be a very logical, common sense position, but all that matters is what the law says. 'The word 'streaming' and the word 'download' are nowhere in copyright law,' MP3tunes' CEO Michael Robertson told Ars.

If Apple and Google are dutifully trying to hammer out licensing deals, why did Amazon go ahead and launch Cloud Player without them?Īmazon 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 representative implying that the company was looking into legal options.īut are licenses required for users to play back music that they have legally purchased, even if that playback is coming from 'the cloud?'