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Amazon's Cloud Player: We Don't Need a License
halfEvilTech writes "Amazon has launched Cloud Drive and Cloud Player without securing streaming licenses from the music industry. But does it need to? Amazon says 'No.' The music industry? 'Yes.'" Do I need a license to stream MP3s from system RAM to the MP3 player? From my hard drive to RAM? From my file server to my machine?
My.MP3.com tried out a similar argument years ago, and it cost them a $53 million lawsuit (which bankrupted them). And in many ways this is even worse. MP3.com at least required you to prove you actually owned a disc before you could stream it. Amazon will let you upload ANYTHING (pirated, ripped, bought--makes no difference) and stream it.
Now Amazon certainly has a better cadre of lawyers at its disposal than mp3.com did. And it has a lot more muscle with the industry (since it's once of the leading music retailers). But, even with that, this is still a stunningly ballsy move on their part. Hell, Sony sues people for even looking funny at their IP.
And, yes, I hope Amazon wins out on this. If nothing else, it would set a nice precedent for Google and Apple to open up their upcoming music cloud services in a similar fashion.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Do I need a license to stream MP3s from system RAM to the MP3 player? From my Hard Drive to RAM? From my File Server to my machine?
Don't give them any ideas!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Do I need a license to stream MP3s from system RAM to the MP3 player?
YES
From my Hard Drive to RAM?
YES
From my File Server to my machine?
YES
All rights are reserved to the MAFIAA. Any usage not anticipated is therefore a crime !
Amazons lawyers will find a friendly, more bribable judge and eat you alive, setting a precedent you don't want set. So please please PLEASE follow up on this one :)
Amazon may be right with respect to music files people presently own.
But in the future, music files may be sold with clauses addressing "cloud players".
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
The TV content providers are objecting to cable companies streaming their shows to iPads and other "non TV" devices in the home, even though they are being paid for that content. I don't understand their argument, but their logic is unmistakable; they want more money, more money, more money. I hope Amazon wins this thing on very broad grounds. I don't mind paying for content, but once and only once and for any device I own.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
LEAVE THE MUSIC INDUSTRY ALONE!!!!
This drama is better than any of the movies released this year thusfar!
Amazon now has the benefit of CNN et al. v. CSC Holdings, aka the Cablevision Remote DVR Lawsuit, where the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Cablevision's favor and specified that, in part, the specific actions of the remote user instructing the remote DVR to record and play back the copyrighted material served to exclude Cablevision from liability. SCOTUS refused to hear an appeal on this, so other circuits might be inclined to agree with the 2nd Circuit.
There are probably some differences here (not knowing about the specific functionality of Cloud Player, I won't speculate), so it'll be interesting to see how far Amazon can push the envelope.
... Amazon is whistling past the graveyard on this one. I hope its not a copyrighted tune.
Have gnu, will travel.
The linked article definitely gives the sense that merely being sued by the record companies is deterrent enough, and that "doesn't sound particularly good for Amazon."
We need to get past the fear-mongering and extorsion of the RIAA and MPAA and remember that we have fair use rights. You are *not* entitled to the success of the business model of your choosing. If your business model is illegal, too bad.
I'm pleased to no end that we finally have someone as big as Amazon, a company with a proven track record of leveraging a legal advantage (remember one-click?), taking on this fight. It's your music, on your private space, not shared with anyone else. The record companies would have you pay a fee to hum a tune to yourself in your car.
If you ask the RIAA what you need a license for, the short answer is "everything" according to them. They exist because they seek to claim rights to everything possible and expect people not to take the issue to court when they need an exception.
The RIAA and similar activities are criminal in my opinion as they are extortionists who routinely claim to have rights over materials they do not have rights to. If the RIAA is to persist, the government needs to hand down an exclusive list of what they can claim and the requirements on how to make claims... requirements such as proof the material being litigated over is actually covered by their "watch." Further, I think in order to assert copyright protection, the copyrighted materials should be registered with the library of congress formally and in an unprotected digital format. (They should at least pretend to honor the social bargain of copyright and eventual public domain.)
Please Google and Apple, join Amazon and explain to the 4 greedy bastards and the MAFIAA that a music file does not need a specific license to be streamed once it has been bought.
http://www.transparency.org
Do I need a license to stream MP3s from system RAM to the MP3 player? From my Hard Drive to RAM? From my File Server to my machine?
From one party to another? They might have legal footing but not based on that logic.
Yes, before mp3.com launched their my.mp3.com service which was declared illegal.
Myplay tried to get the record industry interested in downloads, but they couldn't get any interest from the majors, the best they could do was their online storage service and DMCA compliant user tailored radio streams. No flash in those days either, you needed to configure winamp or some other external player to actually stream the content.
myplay never had any legal issues, they simply didn't have enough money to maintain such a service back when terabytes of disk space were only available in refrigerator sized racks of disks, and when most people were still on modem connections.
So, i guess these are the questions... 1. If you are streaming your music to a device that belongs to you does that count as broadcasting?
2. Does your "personal" license to music allow to remotely broadcast music to a device even if you are the only one that can access it?
3. If you are considered to be broadcasting, shouldnt this effect other devices such as sling box? (im pretty sure rebroadcasting sport events is pretty much frowned upon)
4. Does this mean that uploading any music to a personal server makes you a "broadcaster", even if you are the only one that can access the stream? Am i a broadcaster if i email a song to myself for easy access?
5. Where does playback start? Does it start when i select the songs from my server that i want to hear or does in start inside of my device?
of course, i take all this with a grain of salt. i have been streaming music from one computer to another for years. as far as i am concerned, this is no different then having a radio in one room and speaker in another. the fact that anyone feel that they deserve "their fair share" when they arent having to invest in the innovation is offensive to me.
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
If I was one and I worked in Amazon's legal department, I would say something like the following:
If you do this, you will be sued, regardless of the legality of your actions.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
The limewire guys are pinned for $75,000,000,000,000.00 -- so I'm eager to see the RIAA attempt a, say, $150,000,000,000,000.00 lawsuit against Amazon.
Do I need a license to stream MP3s from system RAM to the MP3 player?
Outside the US, that depends on your country's provisions for fair use (one area in which the US seems relatively enlightened). In the UK, if you ripped a CD then you've infringed even before you get round to streaming (although that's never enforced - but if you bring a third party into the process, who knows?)
However, the question is, if you let Amazon stream your files, is it still personal use (bear in mind, Amazon are not ar charity, so they'll have a cunning plan to make some money out of it somehow)? For instance, this snippit from the Amazon Cloud T&C recently turned up on Groklaw:
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...
Do you think you have the right to sub-license your Lady Gaga collection to Amazon?
Disclaimer - I'm not saying that it should be stopped. Who knows, maybe Amazon will force copyright laws to be updated to sensibly cover technologies invented since the player piano?
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
You didn't buy a license you bought a copy. CDs do not come with EULAs or ToS that dictate otherwise and I've never opened a jewel case and found such an agreement. Admittedly, it's been years since I bought anything from a major studio, but I doubt that much has changed.
Consequently, if that's how they view it and expect it to be treated, they'd be liable for all sorts of false advertising and fraud suits.
And in many ways this is even worse. MP3.com at least required you to prove you actually owned a disc before you could stream it.
Ah, but MP3.com ripped the disks and provided the copy to you, which is actually a pretty clear contradiction of copyright law (though perfectly ethical). Amazon is just storing and transmitting data that you provide. I don't know of anything in the law that would restrict this.
From the Amazon MP3 Uploader App Help page:
Files not supported by the Uploader
The following is a list of supported file formats and some of the unsupported file formats. Unsupported files will not show up in the Uploader as they are not available for upload.
Supported file formats
Unsupported file formats
It will be interesting to see how well Amazon stands up to the inevitable court challenges. For music purchased from AmazonMP3, they are certainly on very solid ground, since they can prove that the Cloud Drive user is the purchaser; if Amazon has the legal right to download you the MP3 you just bought, they certainly have the right to download it for you again. The music industry has already taken their (very generous) cut in that case. You paid for it, you get to use it.
Playing back non-AmazonMP3 files is where I think it gets a little sticky.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
The music industry's official distribution channels have come down to Target, Walmart, Apple and Amazon for most of their sales. I suppose there's "FYE," but I can't remember the last time I was in one.
Of those four, Amazon is probably the least evil in terms of what it does to suppliers. Walmart in particular is legendary for cackling like the wicked witch as it tightens the vice around its suppliers' nuts just for shits and giggles. Apple is not as bad, but is run by a man who wouldn't hesitate to make an example of a record label that screwed with it in a way that they deemed "unacceptable."
Really, Amazon is a big stick with which they can beat both Apple and Walmart if they play their cards right. Which is about as likely as the RIAA's executive suing Congress over the DMCA calling DRM an unconstitutional and "socialistic" restraint of trade.
I don't think it would be "broadcasting". Maybe "narrowcasting" is a better term - it's going to a small, determinable amount of endpoints, not to anything that happens to be listening in.
Sorry, I just re-read the post and decided that the way I "snipped" the Amazon quote (unintentionally) put a bit of a slant on it. The full quote is
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.
I don't think that alters my point that they are asking you to grant them rights to IP that you don't own, but Amazon clearly aren't proposing to party down to "your" music!
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Amazon has shown several times now that they're willing to go toe to toe with the RIAA. They had DRM free music before that was the standard, and now they're pushing for cloud storage and streaming. Everything they're doing in regards to the music industry is pro-user and pro-consumer. So what about the Kindle? Why do they bend over backwards at every turn to please the book publishing industry and continue to DRM protect their eBooks? Why is it that they didn't fight the publishing industry on the Text-to-Speech feature? Why aren't they fighting for the consumer's right to lend books to their friends? Amazon is only fighting for the consumer on the MP3 issue because they have nothing to lose. They're a small time player in digital music services and they want to make a mark. If they get shut down, they're no worse off than they are now, but if it takes off they have a chance to be the first out of the door with a HUGE service. I'm becoming less and less confident we'll ever see Amazon fight for the consumer when it relates to the Kindle.
Frozen Insanity
http://frozen-solid.net
Just for this to be in question shows how little the public knows about theirs own rights. Yes, it's tough to own and enforce copyrights in the digital age, but the burden must not be on the consumer.
Why won't you just die quietly?
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
DOES require a license if you wish to transfer music from one machine to another over a local area network. It is just impossible to enforce.
They would also prefer if you purchased a separate copy of the music for each device you play it on. One copy for the car, one for your computer, one for each MP3 playing device (iPod, Cellphone).
Basically they think they should get re-paid for the same music several times over. If they ever figure out how to monitor the consumer, they will send a bill to you should you take that CD you played in your home stereo and put it into your car.
They were already my favourite company. If they pull this off it would be great :)
Since this service isn't available in the UK yet though, the news surrounding this just reminded me of the existence of Spotify and I've subscribed to it instead. I'm currently listening to the Smashing Pumpkins "Rarities and B-sides" collection that would have cost me £80 to buy on Amazon's MP3 store, and I could never justify the cost considering I have about half the tracks (and you can't buy them individually). Paying a subscription instead of regularly buying albums will save me a loooot of money overall..!
which is totally what she said
In 2009, Amazon's corporate revenues were $26.53B. For the same year, the entire RIAA's revenues were only $6.3B.
Amazon should be able to swat them down like a fly.
Honestly, by and large, I cannot parse a thesis out of your post to respond to. That being said, there are a couple things in it that, if I understand them correctly, are used erroneously to form some sort of "MP3.com should have been considered legal" thesis.
Yes, but there is little doubt you're infringing copyright by uploading a copy of a song to Amazon (or ripping it off your CD or anything). However, there is this nice affirmative defense called "fair use." The factors of fair use come out differently when applied to the two systems at issue.
The snag is that not everything can be considered a "normal use." I do come down on the side of space shifting (which is basically what this service is) being fair use, but you're making a conclusory statement when you say copying your music to another "person's" hard drive across the globe is "normal" use. You need to defend it, and that's precisely what is going to be at issue if this went to court.
But it probably won't go to court; Amazon and Google will settle out of court like Google did with the books issue. They'll pay some kind of license to the recording industry because it's cheaper than litigating the issue. It'll take a small company (that can't afford to—or is not willing to—settle) offering a similar service and a talented group of cause lawyers (like the EFF) to get the ruling at the SCOTUS level.
If you look at the fine print of the license agreement you have to attest to Amazon that YOU have the proper license to upload and stream the file. YOU accept all responsibility if it turns out to be illegal.
The question which may get raised - and this is part of a slippery slope - is what happens when Amazon puts your purchases in your storage area for you directly, and then uses deduplication to minimize the total storage on their servers? Because the Amazon versions are bit-identical copies, they would hold only one master which would be served to many end users. The only difference between Amazon and MP3.com at that point is that Amazon collected the first sale revenue.
There's a second part to this. Since many files will be copied, and even two independently ripped mp3s. flacs, wavs, etc, can be bit-identical, Amazon could be deduplicating and re-serving consumer uploaded content.
I hope they win, but there will be some sticky spots to get through along the way.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Finally a big player has stepped into the ring. :D This should be great!
how is babby formed?
Notice every one of your sentences starts with 'I' except for all the bits where Amazon is involved which you seemed to have excluded. I doubt the courts will be so willing to ignore that Amazon IS in the picture.
There are two parties involved.
Amazon is not "excluded" from that example:
I replace the dedicated VM with an account on someone else's system, is this legal?
Amazon is the "someone else". They're renting you virtual space on a virtual system. By your logic, you can't store music in a rented apartment because the landlord is involved. Any judge or jury would say that you can do that.
Putting moderation advice in your
if i had to guess then i'd say that when you upload your music to amazon they dedupe it so that it only takes a tiny amount of space. and technically it's a separate file so they can just argue that they are providing cloud storage and you're streaming your unique content. when in the end it's all deduped common data. intel x86 hardware is powerful and cheap enough these days to probably process the deduped data on the fly when people want to stream it
According to Napster (current day Napster, that is) you are buying an "Ownership License". They used this argument to deny me a refund after I bought a single track, then later bought the album that single track came from; note that albums are sold at a discount when compared to the sum total of the price of their individual tracks. They ended up giving me the refund when I pointed out that if I had "Ownership", I wouldn't need their "License"; once they realized I knew they were talking out of their asses and I could see through their bullshit, they dropped the act and refunded me my $0.99, responsibly eating the $0.62 for which they're "financially responsible to the copyright holder for [my] purchase" as cost of doing business, to keep a customer.
I strongly suggested to them that they implement a system that reviews prior purchases and if a user attempts to buy the same track (same version from the same album) twice, either by buying the single twice or by buying the single and later buying the album, alert them that they already own the track before completing the purchase. In the case of a single, the user would have the option to remove the track from their cart or keep it in the cart (e.g. to replace a lost or deleted copy). In the case of an album, the user would have the option to receive credit for tracks already owned (and no further copies of those tracks will be provided with the album) or to receive an additional (or replacement) copy of those tracks.
I'm not sure if they've implemented this, but I was told it would be considered. I'm pretty sure they considered it long enough to reach for the delete key, but I made my case and I think it's a pretty fucking valid one.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
From my understanding of the article, it seems the crux of the argument between Amazon and RIAA et. al. is the definition of streaming; Amazon will argue users are downloading files from a "cloud" based external hard drive while the music industry will argue that transferring music files from a point of origin to a playback device is streaming.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
Please go die, and stop crying every time you don't make enough money on the backs of underpaid artists.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Amazon's Cloud Player?
With the number of lawsuits the music industry has filed against people I hate to say it, but this is one lawsuit I'd love for them to file. And then have Amazon file a counter lawsuit, and win. Copyrights and copyright laws have been way out there, in outer space, for too long and need to be grounded.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Isn't a streaming license intended to charge a fee for streaming content to which the listener likely doesn't own a license; or at the very least, is unknown? In this case, hasn't the listener already paid (assuming the content isn't stolen) for a license on the content they are streaming to themselves? Assuming I understand the issue correctly, it really sounds like they are trying hard to double dip and receive payment twice for the same license.
Anyone know if consumer music has an explicit streaming license clause attached? And if so, has that ever been tested?
This is not broadcasting.
Wikipedia: "Broadcasting is the distribution of audio and video content to a dispersed audience via radio, television, or other. Receiving parties may include the general public or a relatively large subset of thereof."
Whether it was a "license" or a "copy", it's still subject to copyright law. Afterall, when you buy a copy, you still have limited rights to what you're allowed to do with it - e.g. you can't make a thousand copies and sell them in stores or on the street, even though it's "yours". Effectively, copyright is in some ways like a license, even if you saw no EULA.
This could be a real big software patent showdown. Two corporate behemoths, loaded to the gills with money, prepared to fight the software patent battle down to the bloody bitter end.
I can only dream. To me patenting a streaming format is like patenting a spoken language. A company cannot patent how I program my mind; they shouldn't be able to patent how I program my computer. This is a basic liberty question.
It IS that broad in the Berne convention. 100%.
I must say I was quite excited when I read the headline. After reading the actual article though I must say I am much less so. It seems like this is an argument over who can stream what content from where, assuming that the streamed content was already legally obtained. In this regard, if Amazon and the RIAA DO battle in court, I feel like very little will change in the ways of RIAA's current copyright laws. Furthermore, I suspect that the RIAA knows its bounds, and will avoid going to court outright against Amazon especially since their argument seems to be rather weak. I think the best we can expect is an undisclosed settlement between the two.
xkcd wins again!
Rub your lamp!
http://xkcd.com/879/
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
>Do I need a license to stream MP3s from system RAM to the MP3 player?
>From my Hard Drive to RAM? From my File Server to my machine?
According to the Music Industry to need to pay licensing fee for:
- Ripping CDs to the CPU
- Copying music in the CPU to the cache
- Copying music in the cache to RAM
- Copying music in RAM to the Hard Drive
- Copying music between Hard Drives
- Copying music from your PC to your MP3 player
- Uploading or downloading music from your internet backup
- Uploading or downloading music to and from any backup media and/or server(s)
- Listening to your music on any device
- Listening to music on TV, Radio, etc
- Having music in any format
- When someone on your block did one of these things and didn't pay them
- Saying the word "music"
- Listening or singing any music, including any song they do not own
- For living
- For being dead
If you don't believe me look up some of the lawsuits the RIAA has filed.
More importantly, a big chunk of those RIAA revenue came through Amazon. They are the #2 music retailer after Walmart. They can slow down the money pipe, and quickly, for the label that gets in front of this bus. Worst case, they go scorched earth and quit selling that label's albums for a week. Every artist on the label's roster will freak. Investors will panic. Blood in the streets.
Amazon owns those guys. And that's while this will last. A smaller site could never get away with it. In the end, public policy and rule of law is once again a leaf on the wind when corporate interests clash. The loser is market competition, and eventually, all of us.
same old arguement:
you're allowed to upload whatever file you want for storage, and retrieve it from where ever you want, but only if it doesn't end with mp3?
you're allowed to put them on an external drive, but not if that external drive exists on another machine?
you're allowed to record songs from the radio, and play them from anywhere you wish, but not from a server? what if own the server? what you have rights to the server? does that mean
who makes these fucking laws? they;re my files and i'll do what damn well please with them. (short of giving them everyone for free, of course..)
It is technically illegal for you to rip CDs for which you do not own the rights to do so. This de minimis infringement may not be practically enforceable and may not, individually, cause harm to copyright owners, but one does NOT make the same case when talking about employment opportunities. Now we've moved from the realm of "mv cds for my use" to "rip anyone's cds for anyone's use." You're making a business model of wilfully and knowingly violating the law, and the courts generally frown on that.
You own a copy of that music, big difference. Which means that this...
...is total BS. You can buy music, transfer it to any devices you own, make a thousand personal backup copies of it, destroy it, list it on Ebay for a billion dollars - and there's not a damned thing the label can do about it.
What copyright restricts you from doing is making copies of music and distributing them without permission. All this "licensing" nonsense is just RIAA propaganda.
Now that that's out of the way, would you by chance be interested in purchasing some oceanfront property in Nebraska?
Just like you can't buy a car, reverse engineer it, and start mass-producing that car and competing with Mazda with their own product. You bought the car, not the plans to the car, nor the rights to sell it.
Well, actually, you can, for most auto parts There's no copyright in functional parts. For that, you need a patent. There is a big aftermarket auto parts industry. The parts are copies of the originals, not new designs. The major auto manufacturers have tried to get legislation to stop that in the US, but Congress rejected it.
You forgot the $73 trillion that they'll be collecting from LimeWire.
But Amazon makes real money when you stream from their cloud.
This is bullshit. Amazon loses money when you stream from their cloud. They make money when they sell you music and they make money when they sell you additional storage. But actually storing and streaming cost money.
Unfortunately Amazon doesn't 50+ years of lobbying on their side. Lets hope the law sides with fair use...
but... your honor.. that $26.5B would have been paid to us, had Amazon not streamed that music, taking the money straight out of poor Bono's hands.. Poor guy can barely afford to fuel his private jet this week.
The record companies aren't willing to admit it, but they make a lot of money selling replacement CD's when a CD becomes lost, stolen or otherwise unplayable. I suspect that they have made a lot of money selling replacement MP3's when the device holding it gets damaged or otherwise unusable, or when DRM prevents playback on a new device.
If this cloud service keeps people from having to repurchase content, the record companies stand to lose a lot of money.
I've often wondered why it's usually impossible to get replacement media when a CD is damaged. After all, what you really did was license the music, at least according to the RIAA. Damaged media doesn't negate your license to the "intellectual property" that you purchased.
Look at how different software is. If I buy a Windows server license, there's a media kit for a nominal fee. If the media becomes unusable, I just get another media kit and reuse the license.
It seems that the record companies want the good (for them) stuff that comes with licensing but not the rest of the bargain.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
I would pay so see this public fly swatting you speak of. PPV Amazon vs Dead Business Model.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Why doesn't the RIAA set up direct debit so they can just skip court and take the money straight out of everyone's bank accounts?
You guys are missing the point. Amazon knows exactly what happened to MP3.com, and, regardless of what our intrepid online industry journalists tell us, Amazon is absolutely not suiting up to go to the mats against the recording industry in open court. That's crazy.
Instead, they see two fantastic outs for them: first, since Google and Apple are now behind the curve, both of them will go crazy trying to finalize their licensing agreements with the industry so they can release their locker services. Every moment they wait will be another customer lost because he or she is intractably set up in Amazon's cloud and reluctant to switch, both for the inconvenience and the upfront payments of a yearly subscription. When they finally do come up with licensing, Amazon need only say, "Well, just give us whatever you gave to Google and Apple and we'll sign up."
Or, if the RIAA moves faster than that (files an injunction or something), all Amazon needs to do is show them their magnificently profitable business model and amazing infrastructure and say, "You could sue our pants off for a decent amount of money and we can shut this down, or you can sit down with us and we can figure out a way so we both can make even more money over an infinite period of time."
Amazon knows what's coming. They're just betting that the recording industry has figured out how much money they lost in the last decade trying to stick with their traditional goods model and is willing to try something progressive.
Do I need a license to stream MP3s from system RAM to the MP3 player? From my Hard Drive to RAM? From my File Server to my machine?
17 USC 117(a): "... it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner."
So, no.
And before you start arguing that MP3s aren't computer programs:
17 USC 101: "A “computer program” is a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result."
If the RIAA wants me to pay for even thinking about hearing a song, then conversely, can I charge them every time I hear music that I don't want to hear? After all, it's their product that is invading my personal space uninvited!
Either that or I get permission to kick the dude's ass who is playing his car radio too damned loud.
Amazon doesn't have judges that were ex-Amazon employees or consultants. The RIAA can easily get venue changes to steer cases into courtrooms that are sympathetic to their cause. Amazon may be big and have some decent lobby muscle, but the RIAA has been after copy-protection with legal cases for over a century.
It's a part of their business model, and their business model makes money. That's enough. If it weren't an important part of their model, they wouldn't need it, and they wouldn't care.
It has value to them. So they should being paying for it. That's what "value" means in a capitalist society.
More importantly, it's not their decision to make. It's not their property in the first place.
When you use amazon's cloud to stream your music, it's your music, and you've done nothing wrong. But amazon has. Because every time you stream it, they are effectively selling it to you again. They either charge you per usage, or advertise to you, or promote additional services. That means amazon is redistributing and reselling the music. you don't have the right to grant that permission to them. and they don't have it in the first place.
So what you're saying is that it is copyright infringement on the part of a cloud service provider to allow the storage of files that the end user does not own the copyright to? I agree that Amazon would be infringing copyright if they allowed access to someone other than the proper owner of that copy, but that's not what this service does. It allows the owner of a copy to store said copy and retrieve it. Nothing else. Amazon is taking a risk here in that if the service isn't secured well enough and the files are somehow made publicly accessible, they could end up unintentionally committing copyright infringement on a huge scale.
Actually, I'm not sure why the music industry would be against a service like this. It would allow a very easy means to track and catch copyright infringers. All they'd have to do is request that the cloud service provider give them info on users that upload a large number of files matching naming/hashes/watermarks of music on known illegal file sharing sites.
Knowledge Brings Fear
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Plus settling out of court doesn't set a legal precedent - meaning that everyone's afraid to start a competing service and still face litigation.
One more point. Unlike some pure-music shop, Amazon's revenue comes from a variety of sources. If Sony told Amazon "You can't sell Sony music anymore", it would be a hit in revenue, but Amazon has enough other revenue sources that it would be a small one. Meanwhile, if Amazon told Sony, "We're not stocking Sony music anymore", your scenario above would result. The labels are trying a power play on a player with more power than them. Pass the popcorn, this should be fun to watch.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
Or, "Provenance matters".
if i had to guess then i'd say that when you upload your music to amazon they dedupe it so that it only takes a tiny amount of space. and technically it's a separate file so they can just argue that they are providing cloud storage and you're streaming your unique content. when in the end it's all deduped common data.
They can keep deduping and get around the whole argument by deduping at hardware or filesystem block level, instead of comparing complete files. That way, they can just call it a compression algorithm.
It was on the back -- the part where it says "Copyright such-and-such year such-and-such company". You know, the notice that everyone knows is there and everyone understands the meaning of when they're not feigning ignorance.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
And a hard drive manufacturer's business model depends upon making money from people storing their data (of which digital music is for most people a large part).
You bought the car, not the plans to the car, nor the rights to sell it.
Really? You're telling me I don't have the right to sell a car I own? You might want to check your facts there.
There's a huge difference between streaming from your hard drive versus streaming from amazon. Yoru hard drive is YOUR hard drive. No one profits when you stream from your hard drive.
Not really. Is it OK if I put my mp3's in my Dropbox folder so I can listen to them at both work and at home? That's certainly not MY hard drive, but it seems perfectly legit to me.
Amazon is NOT starting a streaming service where you don't have to pay; what they ARE doing is starting a service that helps people listen to music they already own. If I have the right to listen to my music (which of course the RIAA would prefer I didn't), then why don't I have the right to hire a company to help me do it?
Last I looked, the opinion of "many lawyers" in courtrooms had about as much legal power as "the opinion of poptones."
If you're going to cite these things you should take a minute to actually read them. "Betamax," for example, did not rule that copying television programs and movies for one's home library was not a violation of copyright - it clearly says otherwise, in fact - but it said this was clearly not a violation that was in any practical sense enforceable or, individually and by itself, harmful to the industry.
creating an online service specifically for the storage and playback of unlicensed music - and creating a business model from that - is exactly the sort of thing that has been shut down in case after case.
Your an idiot, Amazon isn't reselling you your music by streaming. Just giving you easy access to storage you paid Amazon for. (or storage they are offering for free.) There is no restriction on what you store there and no else has access to your storage. (baring a security breach.) For all intents and purposes Amazon is a external HDD with long range capabilities. You say you write software and don't appreciate people stealing it? based on your arguments I'd bet you consider using a VPN or remote server theft then?
The most profitable model I've ever heard of for music was the jukebox. 25 cents to listen to a song, whether or not you owned it, regardless of how many times you've played it - and all without the guarantee that it would even play before you left the establishment. And I don't remember anyone complaining about the cost.
So what if there was a service which functioned as a jukebox, but with a monthly service fee instead of a per song fee. Now, there's nothing revolutionary about that of course, plenty of attempts have been made at doing just that. The problem with those models is that they didn't have enough content to automatically entice users to discover (and hence pay to listen to) enough new music to make it profitable.
But if you had a large enough library that you could create various types of iTunes-type genius playlists based on things like:
2nd favourite songs of people who listed the same favourite song as you
Songs/albums manually suggested by the actual artist of the song you're listening to
It would take both a tremendous amount of content to generate truly successful recommendations, as well as way of uploading records of your preferences/familiarity from various music programs such as iTunes xml.
In addition to that, there would be ample upselling opportunities - a section displaying available live concerts from the artist playing, a section for merchandise from the artist, maybe even sections for music learning products such as video lessons which included the song being played, or learning materials created by the artist. With enough users, and the ubiquitous face book links, sections could be created where people could join others wishing to carpool a local concert (and or chaperons for minors wishing to attend).
Again, I'm aware that all the capabilities exist in spades across all the various balkanized music services; but none of them have every gotten enough cooperation from music publishers to achieve the critical mass necessary to add sufficient value to make people comfortable paying a monthly fee to possibly do little more than listen to what might be in their own library with greater ease of use.
As for the licensing fees for the music, the monthly fee's net profit could easily be proportioned to actually publishers of the music that was heard.
Full disclosure: a big part of the motivation for wanting to see a service like this succeed, is to finally drive music profits to the artists creating the music people listen to. Right now, the artists making money are the ones that are popular among people who don't know how to get music for free; not the artists that are popular among people who are actually listening to music. This would also have the effect of driving home the value of albums or songs that people keep listening to years after their release, hopefully nudging the music industry into investing more in artists that have more going for them than nice tits and a copy of Antares auto-tune.
I think that trying to use this service will show up the crummy upload speeds of their broadband. I reckon uploading 10 albums will max out my upstream for a week.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Obviously the media mafia says yes. It’s like when some senator said that we should let companies decide which amount of taxes they should pay. As Jon Steward did put it: "Weeel... let me see... it is rouuuund (*draws a circle in the air with his finger*)... and it has a hooole in the middle...".
Fact is: If you ask someone else what you "should" do, they will tell you what they want to have. Duh.
What is good for you, is to ask what's in it for you. This includes those that you care for.
In my case,
I care for me and my friends... and free music is best for them...
and for great artists... and maximum rewards is best for them.
In no case is the media reproduction and artist extortion mafia even related to those that I care for.
So my rule is to... GIVE. THEM. NOTHING! BUT. TAKE. FROM. THEM. EEEVERYTHING!
(Then give much of that to artists so they can make free music for me and my friends.)
I must be some kind of leader... Since Slashdot is following me to the grave.
Business "models" don't make money. Selling stuff makes money. If they sell more mp3s because of this then they win. But guess what? If they sell more mp3s the record companies also win. The recording industry is in no way harmed by this.
Wasn't it $75 trillion? The other 2 trillion must have gotten tied up in RIAA accounting practices.
.. When there are services that automate sharing login credentials for accessing one drive by many "users". Sorta like how there are sites that store and give out logins to get around paywalls for new sites. Amazon will have to police this and shut it down immediately. Or else it gives the music industry a possible argument to say that Amazon is facilitating piracy.
Oh, I certainly agree that the music industry might very well benefit from this service in the ways that you've described. But that's not my decision. I'm sure they should consider more than what I see at first glance.
Regarding the rest of your comments, there's the one more part. It's less about amazon's service being exclusively storage, and more about amazon's service being commercial. If I were a commercial music person -- perhaps I'm a producer who works with music every day, professionally, and have all of the licences to do so in general. And I use a commercial professional service to help me manage my business, then my licence to work with the material easily extends to those third-party contractors that I use to do business. That's a part of any NDA's need-to-know boundary extensions too.
In this case, we're talking about consumer music persons, not commercial ones. And now they are contracting a commercial entity. Which means that the product (the music) is moving from a consumer buyer to a commercial business. In everything, that's a different world. Back to the car examples as always, you can drive your friend to work, and call it carpooling. But if you start to drive many people to work, and they pay for gas, you become a business. Your car becomes a commercial vehicle. Your insurrance changes, your tax changes, and your car needs to be inspected differently for "public safety". And if you offer rides to the public, you become a taxi, which brings about way more laws and issues, to protect all involved -- including the car manufacturer whose warranty was never designed for continuous usage scenarios.
In the end, it really comes down to the one phrase -- "that's not what it was sold for". Pricing changes, safety changes, people need protecting differently. Perhaps the original artist used a snippet from another source, and purchased the licence for that snippet, and isn't allowed to sell it on-line. Television shows used to licence music and not purchase the licence to VHS tapes for that music. Years later, the show's released without the opening music (Married With Children is a good example).
You never know where the rights exist across the many many people involved along the ways. But the music industry is interesting that way. You can pay a central source who can grant you rights to other people's property. Because it's convenient that way. Radio stations, for example, can usually play anything at any time for any reason -- because they pay for that ability in general. It's interesting.
But I've always liked the other sides too. The side that people use in politics and in law. Some things are slippery slopes, and some things become ambiguous. Sure free speech was never meant to include a lot of things that it does, but there's no good legal way to limit it without ruining the good parts. The same goes for any legal exercise, music distribution included.
At some level, there's likely no good way to allow amazon to do what they itnend, without also allowing your neighbour to hold onto your collection, index it, play it for himself, and something. It can be a failure of the legal system to differentiate. It doens't have to be the specific case itself.
Nope, not true. The hard drive manufacturer's busines model depends on you using their product. They don't get any kind of access to the content at all. They don't receive ANYTHING from you except the dollars. And the dollars that you give to them are most definitely yours to give (loans aside).
However, amazon won't receive your dollars. They'll receive your music -- which isn't entirely yours. Because you don't own the rights to most aspects of the music. You own the rights to listen to the music, not to analyze it and to sell the results.
Amazon will then profit from your actual music. They'll hash it, they'll index it, they'll analyze it, and they'll sell the stats for real dollars.
If I write music, and it's mine, and someone steals it, it doesn't matter if they stole it to listen to it (which was the reason that I wrote it) or they stole it to analyze it and discover what good music really is (which was to be my next reason to sell it, maybe), they've still stolen my music and used it and profitted from it and paid me nothing.
That's what's happening. Amazon is getting the artist's music, because you're giving it to amazon, without the artist's permission. You've transfered a consumer good that you purchased as a consumer to a commercial entity without anyone ever paying commercial prices.
That's not what the HDD does.
You don't get to sell my product, on your terms, and say that I win. You don't get to take something that I sell for $10, resell it differently for $50, adn say I win. You never bought the right to resell it. I'll say whether or not you can resell my product, thank you. It's not yours to resell, or to redistribute, as a business. (Personal transfer is way different.)
Business "models" do make money -- when you sell the business.
A week? For the duration of the case would be fair, I feel.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Amazon isn't reselling anything. They have the right to sell the mp3 which was already negotiated. You have no say whether or not they can sell storage.
One Glearing problem with you theroy, Amazon isn't broadcasting, they're unicasting, to the registered user of the cloud drive, and only data they themselves uploaded. They are not charging money for basic service, no matter how loud you claim they are. They have a ToS that spells out exactly what they will do with your data. Do I believe they just store it and never look at it again? No that would be naive. But really what they're doing isn't a whole lot different that what dropbox does, and its exactly what Ubuntu One does. Its also what Google and Apple are planing on doing. (The difference being Amazon has enough clout/balls to not be bullied by **AA.) The rest of your analogy, while intresting only serves as a reminder of how broken that model is in TODAYS market. (if it ever really worked.) The part you left out, is when the Hollywood studio gets sued for infringement. You want to dawn you tinfoil hat and hide in the conner from Gmail, Amazon and the like, thats fine. But stomping your feet, whining about getting paid and fear mongering, only makes you look foolish at best, a sympathetic shill at worst.
If Amazon takes your music and sells it to somebody else, then they are violating copyright.
But they have no reason to do that, because they are a digital music store--they already have copies of all of your music--they don't need yours.
If they simply provide online storage of the music you have bought (which you own, even though the law limits what you can do with it, just as it limits what you can do with your car or your gun), then they are simply acting in the role of a hard drive vendor. The only difference is where the hard drive resides.
Amazon makes no profit from the hard drive storage, unless you purchase more from them (in which case they are providing the same capability as a hard drive vendor). So the free storage serves their business model in that it enhances the value of what they do sell (i.e. music), and it acts as a free sample to interest customers in their paid storage plans.
You are not reading hard enough. They don't have the right to sell the data that they glean about the mp3s. and that's exactly what they are doing.
Amazon's ToS were agreed to by you. Not by the owner of the music that you're giving to them, that's the problem.
But like I said. It's your turn. You create something, and then see what you think others should be able to do with it. For as long as you get paid a salary, or work for someone else, your opinion on property ownership is worthless -- because you don't own any property to protect.
But you are certainly correct, the existing systems and models don't work today, and they haven't worked since tape dubbing was a consumer option.
you missed the point. amazon gets your usage data regarding the music. That's something that no drive vendor gets. that has real value. and it's not something that's yours to give away. some of it is, but not all of it. not the group aggregate actually. that's property of the music owner -- usually the artist or publisher. not you. you can't give that to amazon because it's not yours.
and that's what they wind up selling, which is how they profit, and wyh it's free to you.
That's ridiculous. I've not signed away my rights to information about my own behavior. A music vendor only has rights to my usage data if they pay me for it. For exclusive access to that information, my price is $1,000 per song. So far, nobody has been lining up to buy. Until such time as I sign away exclusive rights to information about me, that information is mine to do with as I wish. I can certainly trade it to Amazon in return for online storage (although in point of fact, Amazon already has some of that information, since I buy most of my music through Amazon).
And if I tell you that when you use their cloud service, you're giving them exactly that? They know each and every time you listen, from where to where, where you were when you were listening, what you tend to skip. And then, with a little calculator, what kind of mood you were in across the month, when your girlfriend dumped you (with an 80% accuracy), and so on and so forth.
And they don't need your permission, because they aren't measuring your downloads of your music from them, they are measuring their uploads of your music to you. Even though it's 100% identical, with a three-second latency easily factored in.
You don't need to sign away those rights. You've created rights on their side, and simply synchronized the two sets of data.
That's the problem. They get exactly that, without paying you the $1'000 at all -- let alone per song.
You wouldn't be telling me anything that I didn't already know. But the point is that it's my information, not the record company's, and I can give it away or sell it as I choose.
The $1000 per song is for exclusive rights, which would prohibit me from selling that information or using a similar cloud service from another vendor, such as Apple.
No, it's not all yours. What you do is yours. What you do with someone else's property is, in part, theirs. We're talking commercially here. And you're giving commercial usage rights to that information over to amazon. It's not all yours to give. Because you didn't buy those rights for $0.99. That's why.
Your music would simply cost more, if you were to be sold those rights. And today's market has chosen fewer rights for fewer dollars, instead of greater rights for greater dollars. That's why you can now have a collection of music that smokes even the wealthiest music enthusiast's collection 30 years ago.
You don't have more than he did. You have less of more. He had more of less. There's a difference.
You say this but that doesn't make it true.
Actually, I said "that". You said "this".
(:
"In that case the website stored one copy of each piece of music, required the user to verify they owned it, then allowed you access to their stored copy."
In the case of modern storage systems, this is almost certainly what will happen "behind the scenes" at Amazon. They will probably use a storage system which will be calculating hashes of each file or block, and deduplicating data invisibly, and hence having a vastly larger logical storage space than physical. So, in essence, if 10,000,000 store the same 10 MB MP3 file, it will only use 10MB (plus metadata, perhaps another 500MB? WAG) of actual storage. However, logically each user has a separate file. If I modify my copy's tags, it will "copy on write" and I will now have my own copy, causing Amazon to store more actual data.
On another topic, I personally would be extraordinarily wary of this service. (Or, for that matter, every single cloud-based storage service.) The RIAA, MPAA, or whoever now just needs to subpoena Amazon and ask for a copy of all their stored data for all users to go on a fishing expedition, rather than having to subpoena every user in the world. I'm sure Amazon would fight that, but who knows who would prevail?
If Amazon encrypted the data on the client-side and streamed only encrypted data, that might be better (no fishing expeditions possible without also breaking the encryption), as the data on Amazon's side would thus be gibberish. However, that would also mean they'd have a 1-1 mapping of logical to physical storage, and thus prohibitively expensive storage costs.