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Amazon AutoRip — 14 Years Late
An anonymous reader writes "Amazon just debuted a new service called Autorip, which grants you MP3 copies of music when you purchase the CD version. This is a technology people have been trying to introduce since 1999, but only recently have the record labels — and the courts — seen fit to allow it. 'Robertson's first company, MP3.com was one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley when it launched what we would now call a cloud music service, My.MP3.com, in 1999. The service included a feature called "Beam-It" that allowed users to instantly stock their online lockers with music from their personal CD collections. ... Licensed services like iTunes were still years in the future, largely because labels were skittish about selling music online. But Robertson believed he didn't need a license because the service was permitted by copyright's fair use doctrine. If a user can rip his legally purchased CD to his computer, why can't he also store a copy of it online? ... the labels simply weren't interested in Robertson's vision of convenient and flexible music lockers. So MP3.com was driven into bankruptcy, and the "buy a CD, get an MP3" concept fell by the wayside.'"
Auto-rip raises an interesting question about resales. It appears that Amazon is granting downloads for CD purchases (even retroactively, for CDs purchased years ago). If I've since sold the physical CD, Amazon would not know that. Furthermore, I could deliberately game the system by buying CDs and immediately reselling them.
I know, it's a stupid edge case, and I could already do this by ripping my own CDs today and subsequently selling them, but it's exactly the type of "problem" that keeps the recording industry up at night.
Why can't we get copies of our ebooks when we buy the dead-tree version?
Well, you [technically] can.... the question should be why can't we legally get a copy of the e-book, when we pay full price for a dead tree book.
...
Also, why are e-books still so expensive? The amount saved by avoiding regular distribution channels should knock more than 10% off the actual book cost
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
On the plus side, you can buy CDs as presents and get the MP3 to keep for yourself.......so Amazon might still have a slight problem to fix.
"How do you buy 'it' twice when the 'it' is two different things, unless you're talking about the text itself and not the form, formatting, etc.?"
You might better address that question to the Supreme Court, since they are the ones that ruled that it is NOT two different things, and that there is such a thing as fair use.
Maybe you can convince them to change their minds, um... because.
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Exactly.
In an interview in the mid 1980s, an RIAA exec admitted that they were trying to get away from "selling" music and wanted to go to a "pay-per-listen" model. Mot even pay per format - they want pay per listen.
This was in the same article that he justified continued high prices for CDs, which were twice that of LPs (they were later found guilty of price-fixing) DESPITE the fact that CDs cost far LESS than LPs to produce.
His justification for colluding to fix prices to make a CHEAPER product to produce more EXPENSIVE to purchase was that it was a better value due to sound quality.
So apparently a massive increase in profit margin due to illegal activities = "a better value."
In short, the content cartels are scum.
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2 clarifications for the summary, since I was the 10th engineer at MP3.com and worked there from 1999-2003:
- We lost to the record labels/publishers not because we gave people access to their music, but because we compiled the music library and streamed it without paying the labels/publishers any royalties. Our strategy was to buy a copy of the CD ourselves, rip it, then claim fair use doctrine when we streamed it to someone else who also owned it. This was a supposed grey area in the law that got cleared up REAL FAST in a media-friendly district court. Services that you see now are paying royalties on what they stream. MP3.com later sued its lawyers that gave the advice on the so-called "grey area" it tried to go through.
- We where not a Silicon Valley company, we where in San Diego. Perhaps if we where SV we would of gotten better legal advice :p