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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."
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
"Personally all music largely dies and most people are just vainly listening to it trying to recapture lost memories. Better to let the old greed driven crap die and let new open, creative commons music take it's place."
I could not disagree more. There was great music made before I was born that is still great. There is music made now (though granted a small percentage) that will also stand the test of time. It's not all throwaway trash.
I don't think Google and Amazon missed the boat here at all. I'd say that Apple missed the boat.
Google and Amazon's services allow streaming. Apple's doesn't. Apple's service is just a sync. A sync that avoids the upload and requires the download.
I can't access my music collection from my work computer without downloading it there. In fact my music collection becomes only available on iPhones/iPods and through iTunes. Amazon will end up being almost entirely platform neutral because they have no dog in the platform game. Google will likely try to support the IOS platform, assuming Apple lets them. I'll admit Google's support will probably lag behind the Android support and not be as good for IOS.
How much you wanna bet me that Apple never puts anything out for Android or any other mobile platform?
Apple's entire strategy here is to extend their lock in while fixing one of the annoyances of multi-device usage with iTunes. If they succeed we all lose.