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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.
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
... 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.
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
...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.
"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.
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 don't see why having your data with you is a disadvantage
Having all of it everywhere is a disadvantage in terms of size and weight.
And if I save my money by not wasting it on pointless web services, then I can put a bigger hard disk in my laptop to store it there...
iCloud is free, the Match part is around $20/year. Going to take a lot of years to pay for that new HD.
Why would I invest in a service that might give more usability at some point in the future?
You'd mostly be paying for what it does now. Isn't the possibility of future enhancements nice though?
Finally, I don't like advertising. I don't like junk mail, spam or telemarketing calls. And if I watch TV then it's usually the BBC here in the UK where there is no advertising. I even do not have cable or satellite TV because I do not believe in paying for a service that also feeds me advertising. Plus I don't want my personal information sent around between corporations who I have not myself chosen to do business with.
I believe in all the same things. I also hardly ever watch TV, I don't subscribe to cable, I don't like advertising AT ALL.
And that is why I prefer to do business with Apple, the only company that seems willing to keep marketers at arms length from the consumers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
1) You then don't have to carry around tens of gigs of data with you wherever you go.
Seriously?
Tens of gigs of data has taken a smaller space in my pocket than my keys for years.
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.
Pretty sure you can listen (maybe someone can confirm). I know there is no Linux upload client which makes your comment a fair point.