Amazon v Music Industry: Music Industry Will Force Licenses on Amazon Cloud Player — or Else

“Amazon’s decision to launch its new Cloud Player without securing additional music licenses has been described as a “bold move” by many observers. It takes serious guts for Amazon to simply declare that it doesn’t need licenses — especially when even casual observers know the music industry thinks otherwise.

Still, this isn’t a one-dimensional issue, and the law has yet to deal much with services like Amazon’s. Record companies fantasize about huge revenues from streaming services, and they fear digital lockers like the plague.

‘The word streaming and the word download are nowhere in copyright law’ — MP3tunes’ CEO Michael Robertson

If the record labels don’t come to a licensing agreement with Amazon soon, they will either be forced to take legal action or implicitly allow other music companies to ditch cloud licenses too.

Amazon vs. the music industry

Amazon launched two new services, Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, earlier this week. U.S. Amazon customers can get free online storage from Amazon to use for whatever they please, but users are heavily encouraged to upload their local music libraries. All Amazon MP3 purchases are automatically synced to the user’s Cloud Drive without counting against the quota, too.

Once the music is copied to the remote drive, users can then use the Cloud Player Android or Web app to stream the music to any compatible device or browser, even if the files themselves had not been synced there . . .” Full Story on Wired.com.

Photocredit: Mediadecoder