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."

Comments

deja vous, anyone?

[v1]

Didn't they already try to pull this with ipods?

Sometimes it's called "shameless greed". Other times it's called "doing business".

Re:deja vous, anyone?

[monoqlith]

It's not greed. It's stupidity.

They rejected every deal these services had to offer, not realizing the obvious financial advantage of having an agreement before launch. They walked, and now they have to play legal catch-up in order to ultimately get probably less than they would have gotten if they had just agreed to the worst deal.

Sigh. Someone on the negotiating team should have known that these companies feel that they could absorb whatever the costs of being sued would be and still walk away profitable. But they didn't. So they have the business sense of gnats.

Re:deja vous, anyone?

[zippthorne]

Well, music is what.. a 9 billion dollar industry? After executive bonuses, executive compensation, payola, legal expenses, democratic fundraisers, chinese labor costs, marketing costs, and maybe something for the musicians, what's left for quality negotiation teams?

Frankly, the real surprising thing is that this "industry" that is, in fact, dwarfed by the net profits of each of more than a couple large corporations, gets such a disproportionate amount of press and political clout.

Re:deja vous, anyone?

[Totenglocke]

So basically the RIAA is trying to claim that if you legally own an MP3 and legally join a service that lets you store said MP3 on a server, you are not legally allowed to play it directly from the server and must download it to your car / computer / phone / mp3 player first? Sorry, but I doubt that'll hold up in court (though with the morons we have in the "justice" system, you never know).

Re:deja vous, anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder why Google, Amazon and Apple don't each buy out one of the major labels outright. It can't be an antitrust issue if each get one. Problem solved.

Re:deja vous, anyone?

[breser]

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.

We're from the music industry

[Compaqt]

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.

Re:We're from the music industry

[Delarth799]

You also forgot that you will need a license if you:
-sing a song aloud
-play a CD in your car too loud
-play the radio too loud
-write down some lyrics to remember that song later
-in any other manner reproduce or recite a song

At some point poking the beast will not be wise

[Telvin_3d]

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.

Re:At some point poking the beast will not be wise

[zippthorne]

No, it's incredible that companies' goals and our own public good might align such that companies seeking their own interest will be fighting for the public good, too.

That's not something to be depressed over, it's something to celebrate the few times it genuinely happens.

Re:At some point poking the beast will not be wise

[AncientPC]

Johanna Blakley gives a TED Talk about fashion's free culture where she compares it to the music and movie industries (slides here, PDF).

They say that pictures are worth a thousand words, so here's a simple chart displaying the relative gross sales of each industry.

Re:At some point poking the beast will not be wise

[Kjella]

The music industry is just one part of it. Pretty much all that work in the IP industry is looking at some form of "First they came for the music industry..." scenario. The RIAA. The MPAA. TV networks. The porn industry. The BSA. E-books. Put together there are a lot stronger forces at work to defend copyright, because they all realize it's not going to stop there. It would come to a showdown of who controls the creative output of all of them, they or the public. Sure, there's a little bit of infighting right now but don't pretend any of them has really changed sides, this is just corporate interests interfering.

Apple is hardly in the "anti-IP" camp. They have a ton of software patents on their products, they subscribe to the idea "we designed it, we OWN that idea". They're just opposed to anything that gets in the way of their profit margins. That's the way with most these companies, they're playing both sides of the fence. Google almost closed one helluva book deal where they'd use copyright to give themselves exclusive rights to the scans. Amazon makes good money on shipping CDs, DVDs, BluRays, computer games and so on - is it in their best interest to stir the pot here? And Microsoft is of course a heavy copyright defender.

So what are they going to say to the music industry? "You're being to obsessive-compulsive about control, ease up!" is the pot calling the kettle black - at least the music industry doesn't have mandatory online activation yet. Both the video and software industry is full of DRM that music doesn't have anymore. They just want to tug at this a little to make them back down, not unravel the whole rug. They certainly don't want the public to take any of this as any kind of endorsement or support for weakening corporate control, that's for sure. In the end I think that's why they reached an agreement, they have more to lose than to gain by bringing it to a showdown in court.

Re:Why not cut out the middle men?

[Nursie]

"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.