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Are Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player Legal?
Fudge Factor 3000 writes "Earlier this year both Google and Amazon introduced cloud music storage where users could upload their music and listen to it wherever they had an internet connection. The music industry, however, was up in arms because they believed that Google and Amazon had to pay additional licensing fees for their music storage services. Tim B. Lee at Ars has written an excellent summary of the legal issues surrounding these services. His ultimate conclusion is that Google and Amazon would probably withstand any legal assaults, but it still remains a tough call."
Didn't they already try to pull this with ipods?
Sometimes it's called "shameless greed". Other times it's called "doing business".
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Land of the Free (Ride for corporations with massive lobby groups)!
Seriously, the ONLY difference with putting it in the cloud and setting up a server in your own home to do this is the RIAA et al see this one and want their Free Lunch.
So why don't google / amazon just start breaking up the recording industry so they don't face these "challenges" by those trying to hold onto their old business models while continually getting rich off of others work?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
And we'd just like to remind you that you need a separate license from us when:
-you buy the CD
-you rip it to your hard drive
-you make backups of your hard drive
-you copy it to your MP3 player
-you copy it to your cloud storage
-you stream it from your cloud storage
-you copy it to your brains neural network
N.B.: If you retain a copy in your brain's storage (also called "song in my head"), you'll need another license.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
It depends. Have they paid for the proper "protection"?
Weren't there a few small companies that did the exact same thing years ago and got shutdown? Maybe due to lack of lawyer funds?
Using web-based.... for musical.... in a cloud.... yeah that ain't legal either
What are you, a fucking IP lawyer now?
... because.
Well, I mean, really!
The artists! Think of the artists!
Child Porn.
Old people. Abused in Nursing homes.
And people can sing anything they want on their Birthday as long as it isn't to the tune written by the Hill's sisters in the late 1800's ... you know, "Happy Birthday to You! ... Happy birt ... [ BANG! THUD! ]
{sound of body being drug out of reality into the cloud. }
----- You can't have a new technology if there is any possible way Big Content can kill you. it. I mean it.
I do not remember that storage media was required a license. Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. is the 1984 USA Supreme Court ruling which said once I bought a song I can record it in another media for my own use. Sony, BASF and Maxell made the cassettes used for the backups, and only Sony objected. But did Sony, like Apple (in the current article) feel it necessary to pay license fees when their own cassette tapes were being used to back up the media?
Gently reply
Every time these types of things rear their head, I can't help but think one thought.
The Music industry isn't very big.
Or at least, not particularly valuable. They are small potatoes. Tin gods that have been acting like 500 pound gorillas for so long that it doesn't get generally questioned. But they are tiny. Miniscule.
It's a slippery number to pin down, but what I see tossed around when the value of the recording industry comes up is yearly revenues in the range of 10 Billion, give or take a couple. Grand total, worldwide. Not just new music or record sales or some small slice, but the grand total yearly gross revenue.
The market cap of Apple alone is in the 300 Billion range. The iPad by itself will likely have a higher revenue this year than the entire music industry. And the other players in the market are people like Google and Amazon and Microsoft. The music industry is repeatedly going out of its way to poke a stick in the eye of a market that is at least one order of magnitude larger than them.
So far it hasn't be worth the trouble of swatting the mosquitoes. Any modern attempt to replicate what Sony did in the 80s and absorb a significant chunk of the music industry will be met with the mother of all corporate and government battles. It would open more anti-trust, market capture, licensing and trade issues, etc. than even their armies of bored lawyers want to contemplate. Even if every interested party in the technology world got together as a consortium to buy out the record companies and license everything on open and non-discriminatory terms it would kick off the legal battle of the century.
But at some point it will be worth it. Between Google and Amazon's services and the massive data center that Apple just built, the tech companies may have spent more in the last year to create these services than the record industry will collectively bring in. If the mice don't learn to fear the cats they will be eaten.
You remember incorrectly. I know it's an incredible task, but RTFA.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
... isn't a storage service. It's only access to the content that Amazon's master archive has stored.
If it is illegal, just hire a judge or buy a bill.
Suppose I took two songs owned by two different copyright holders. Say I slowly change the pattern of one song so until it more resembles another song, and call this a gradient.
At what point does the owner of the first song no longer have a copyright over it?
Please RIAA, Zeno's been kicking your ass since ancient Greece.
Though Apple is in negotiations with the 4 big labels, there will still be thousands of labels that haven't given them permission for users to upload and stream their songs. So Apple's being just as legally iffy as Google and Amazon. The difference is that Apple is cutting deals with the labels most likely to sue them so they won't.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Shouldn't be even be too hard to write an open-source alternative to Amazon Cloud Player, targeted at a medium sized group of friends, which would run on Amazon's EC2 facility. There's probably a sweet spot where the free sharing without worrying about law enforcement would make it worthwhile (and as the **AA's crack down on other means of sharing, this sweet spot becomes smaller and smaller groups).
Was it Chris Anderson who recently suggested that Google simply purchase the whole shebang? Anyway, the entire recording industry is valued at something less than Google's cash reserves.
I would like to be a gecko on the wall to see the look on the Sony Music legal team's faces when they find out that the company they have been suing now owns them. w00t!
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
MP3.COM had the "My.MP3.com" feature, which let users stream music from CDs that they had registered with the site. Universal Music Group sued them and cost mp3.com $53 million in judgements and legal fees.
...all this iCloud, Amazon and Google music storage nonsense sounds a complete waste of time.
For years I've been buying CDs, ripping them to FLAC once then converting to MP3 as I need them. I store the MP3s on a portable hard disk and keep it with me for when I need it. It also works when there's no Internet connection.
Personally, I think far too many of you have far too much spare time on your hands to be worried about some nonsensical and convoluted web services that are trying to justify their own existences. That's why you should learn to think like an engineer because you can discover simpler solutions for yourself.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Google should buy the whole of the music industry and then just disband it. Nothing of value comes from the mass production of what once was art anyway.
I store the MP3s on a portable hard disk and keep it with me for when I need it. It also works when there's no Internet connection.
The iCloud is all about local storage, and replication of same. If you signed up for the Match part, you could take that whole HD, have it Matched, and then download to an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad/Mac any of the songs on that HD over the internet. Then when you went traveling anything you had downloaded would be there...
The 256kbs AAC files would be almost as good as the FLAC in terms of quality, and very probably better than the MP3's.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
To make efficient use of the storage space these services will hash the mp3's, store each unique file once and record which users have uploaded it.
Then the RIAA will subpoena the lists of which users have which mp3's. If a hundred users all have the exact same mp3 and it didn't come from one of the (very few) legal sources of mp3's then at least 99 of them copied it.
Game over.
Incidentally, the usage of AAC serves no practical purpose as it is supported by less players than MP3, FLAC or even OGG.
Well hundreds of millions of people with iPods or iPhones or iPads would disagree with how "useless" an AAC file is.
To claim it's supported on fewer devices than Ogg... absurd.
Every time you use AAC you are one step closer to handing over your Consumer Rights to Apple - my advice is don't use it in the first place, it's evil.
Why? There is nor DRM. At any point I could transcode to some other format if I wanted. The audio quality is quite good (better really than MP3) and it has all the same issues that MP3 does as far as patents go.
I like Flac too but even with cheap disc storage these days the space to keep FLAC of everything is daunting, and there's lots of music I don't care about THAT much.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think there's two basic questions that need a solid answer from the courts (who up until now have declined to directly answer the question) or the legislature (who've been paid large sums of money to avoid answering the question):
The various rightsholders have made much of what's different with digital media. I think it's time to put forward what hasn't changed: that this is the purchase of a copy of a work, just like always. Because I think putting it back into that context, just like books, just like music tapes and CDs, will make it almost impossible for the rightsholders to argue the point successfully. Don't argue piracy and such. If they try to bring it up, push back and say "No, we're discussing legally-purchased copies, ones we paid the author for, just like when we pay for a copy of a book.".
TMC(too many comments);DR I think it's just like a context sensitive storage service. If I build a service that allows users to upload pdfs and (for usage sake) I provide a way to view these files online anywhere they have an internet connection via .. i dunno .. pdf.js maybe does that mean I have to get a license from ebook publishers because my service allows users to upload ebooks (which they may have bought god knows from where) and read them online?
That's my POV.
mov ax,4c00h
int 21h
I was watching a Discovery channel program about taboos of the native peoples around the world. At first,my knee jerk reaction was that it is a lot of hokum! Then I realized that the laws surrounding the sharing of music and video in the Western world is the new form of taboo. Completely arbitary restrictictions with potentially disproportionate repercussions. You know, kill a totem animal and end up as a frog in the next life, share a song and end up broke and imprisoned.
I would like to be a gecko on the wall to see the look on the Sony Music legal team's faces
And I'd like to see the look on Steve Jobs' face :) Goodbye Itunes concept
Plus, can't google just buy a couple of development teams to just produce the 50 most downloaded apps. Goodbye app store :)
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
they are nothing new there has been cloud music for 11 years. the issue is when 1000s of users are able to access alll the info on all the cloud then those users never paid for it ect.
It's legal. Moving on. Aaaaaap. Nono. Don't. Click away from the page.
"I'm taking this loop off." - Jack O'Neill
Re: Are Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player Legal?
Who cares? between Google and Amazon they have a combined wealth that would buy out the MAFIAA whole anyway.
It's "News for nerds." What's your definition of nerd? I'm a developer working with web technologies but I also hold a degree in law. This kind of stuff is incredibly interesting to me because it plays to my interest in the law as well as potentially having a direct impact in the applications I'm building/working with on a daily basis in my job. You're never going to find news that's interesting to every single person in a sufficiently large group, even when that group has broadly similar interests. You could always stop clicking the links you don't find interesting, it's not like this thread is using up a limited slot that a more technical/scientific thread could occupy.
Music can easily be stolen in a variety of very hard to trace methods. The more expensive and locked down the industry makes music the more likely even honest users are likely to steal it. So, here's a tip to the music industry: stop fucking around, welcome to the future, take what you can get.
Maybe after they introduce a Linux client that can be said.
How big is that storage locker full of dead plastic?
Hey, idiot, that rel="nofollow" that Slashdot added to your link means that search engines won't follow that link, so your spam is a complete waste of time.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm glad Google & Amazon are not getting bed with big media. I support loosening the strangle-hold on media with every non-Apple purchase I make.
When has the music industry every cooperated with technology advancements? They always throw hissy fits.
Check out Sockso (I know, weird URL, but you can verify it through some Googling if you want). Provided you can get a static IP or you find a service that will simulate one for you, you have your own personal music server anywhere the Internet can go. And then you do not have to trust a company with your data (backups or not). Of course, this might not get around legal issues if you set it up with accounts for all of your friends or just leave it open for anyone to listen to. But I figured it is a worthwhile two cents to throw in.
I'm in complete agreement. But the fact that users can upload their own music (which may be ripped or downloaded illegally) to Apple just like they can to Google and Amazon, means Apple is no better. It's just that they are making a deal with the bug 4 labels to essentially pay protection money upfront.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Is it just me or is slashdot becoming nothing more than ars technica with moderated comments? A suprisingly large proportion of the stories are simply lifted from the front page of ars. Since I, like probably most people here, already read ars technica and the comments there, its becoming less and less necessary to even read \.
Next they'll be telling us deduplication is illegal...
Yup. That would be a frightening idea, and the MAFIAAs are nonetheless going after it, as mentioned in TFA.
And back to the GP :
Specifically: mp3.com used their copies of MP3s, after determining that the user presumably owns the same track by scanning a CD locally on that user's computer. {...} Even if the files are bit-for-bit the same, as far as law is concerned, the distinction is still important.
Although, I think back at MP3.com's time, I would have been possible to encrypt the tracks using a hash generated from the CD signature. .mp3 files, simple key would have been easy to upload/download back when broadband wasn't widely available.
On its own the data on MP3.com's servers would be useless. But if a user has a legit CD, s/he could generate the needed unlock key and store that into their personal profile.
Unlike full
An that would have avoided MP3 storing non-licensed copies on their server.
(It works like some end-user controlled form of DRM).
I wonder if such a scheme would have better resisted legal challenges...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I agree. It is shameless greed, that's why it is called piracy.
You fuckers just can't wait until you're internets are fully regulated, can ya? Seems like you're all rushing headlong into that Orwellian future you keep complaining about.
If, having legally purchased a copy of a copyrighted work, I wish to store it and access it by several different methods, is this something I have a legal right to do as a consequence of owning that copy?
That's called format shifting. You have a legally purchased copy of a work, and you have to jump through several hoops until you can get to play it (convert a CD into MP3/WMA/AAC/OGG/FLAC/whatever files, because that portable player lacks a CD drive to begin with). (Or for the most trivial example : CD player first make a copy of the data read from the CD into their memory/cache/buffer/ Shockproof(tm) /whatever-it's-called-now, and play the music from here).
In most jurisdiction, format shifting *is* considered fair use.
Now, the problem is that in order to achieve that, you might need to break some form of encryption or another (CD protected against ripping, encrypt AAC file that you need to transform into another format better supported by your player, decrypting DVDs and Bluerays to store them on your media server, etc.)
And then it depends on your local variation of the DMCA-like law in your country. In some countries, format shifting is explicitly exempted (Switzerland comes to mind). In some other, it's much more problematic (see all the problems encountered by DeCSS and DeAACS libraries, just needed to play video from legally purchased plastic discs).
Also, in most jurisdictions, if you're simultaneously playing it on several different devices you might be violating the copyright (like playing it in your car from your pocket player, while at the same time your significant other listens to the same album at home on the living-room set-top box) (although given the sheer size of modern music collections, the probability of indeed playing the same track in both situation is ridiculously low).
Last but not least, playing said copyrighted work to a lot of people at the same time might count as a public performance and require a separate license. Now the exact quantity of people at which the listeners stop being a few friends listening to a private performance, and a crowd getting a public performance : that's something which is not clearly stated.
If the answer to #1 is "Yes.", do I have the right to contract out the management, maintenance etc. of the storage system to someone else?
In theory yes (you're supposed to be free to make backups of work you have. As long as it's your own copy, you can pretty much do anything. It's still *your* copy, residing on someone else's *storage*. It's only when you start distributing to other people that the copyright law kicks in). In practice, the MAFIAAs is trying as much as they can to litigate based on technicalities, in order to force either the user of the 3rd party to pay yet another license (you know, they really need that extra money. Yachts don't grow on trees...)
They managed to sue MP3.com's out of existence, based on the fact that they produced their own rips in-house, to be accessed by users with legally purchased copies, instead of having the users upload their home-ripped files.
They failed to win against Cablevision, because they record shows on users behalf. It's like controlling your PVR using a remote controller. Except that the remote is wired, the wire is called "the internet", and the PVR is stored in their rack-space, with a little bit more distance and longer wire between that PVR and your remote/screen as would have been between a classical PVR in your living room and a TV/infrared remote.
In Google's and Amazon's case, it would again be much more difficult to sue. Also, this time there's a difference in scale : we're speaking of companies whose sheer size make the whole MAFIAA's legal budget comparable to a rounding error on Google's and Amazon budget. They have the financial resource to afford good legal defence.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You're so naive.
If you are going to use an expression, please learn how to spell it and what it means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_vu
http://www.acetonestudio.com
They're the MEDIA industry. Politicians get or lose their jobs based on media exposure. Both know darn well that all the media business would have to do is make some small changes in what gets aired, what music is promoted and so forth - the simple truth about the politicians coming out would not only remove all the current ones from office -- people might not wait for election time to do it, either.
Just a few "interestingly allegorical" movies and some decent protest music from a few of the "manufactured bands" and there you have it. That industry has a bigger stick to wave around than most realize. Yeah, you might be fine, but despite everyone "knowing better" advertising still works, the water torture eventually gets through and actually does "create demand".
In this case, piece of cake since everybody's already pissed. Just focus it a little and ID the perps a little more...
Note how rare it is media reminds us they're now getting government (us in other words) to pay for "stopping piracy"? Of course, if it's not in their best interests (as perceived by them) then it's not in the news. Since they are living well off the current legal situation, they don't want it changed so much, but change the current situation, and they pull out all the stops on those who try to get the change going.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
The way I see it, is that sooner or later these other huge corporations that make considerably more money selling technological gadgets, will soon realize that the annoyance they are dealing with (RIAA) isn't worth dealing with and stomp the crap out of them. When "music" is really just a feature of an app of a device you make, or a service you provide, and you make 1000x more money than the shills that licence the music, they will soon draw the conclusion, that perhaps there is just an easier way to deal with the "music" component. When the make that solution, I would be the RIAA will be out on the street like they deserve.
_for corporations who don't own the music for which these cloud services are created, and yet they can still rake in the commercial dough, and who can butt heads and withstand the letigious assaults upon their sanctity. Us peons who just buy the music and have to deal with 12,502 corporations and lawfirms lurking around every turn when we apply our rights to quietly or loudly enjoy "our music" live with these lop-sided laws every day.
Exactly!
It's a license when it suits them, and a single purchased item when that suits them... some sort of hybrid I suppose they figure.
Same with all the "Own it now on DVD!" commercials... then they say you don't own it, you licensed it, and the license doesn't allow you any right to do much of anything with it.
*sigh*