Print 38 comment(s) - last by jimbojimbo.. on Apr 1 at 11:06 PM












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RE: Gotta love it
By cjohnson2136 on 3/30/2011 10:20:24 AM , Rating: 2
That was one of the things I was a little puzzled about the service and maybe someone could clear it up. Is Amazon just offering storage space where you buy the music and Amazon holds it or is it more streaming like Pandora or Zune?

RE: Gotta love it
By nafhan on 3/30/2011 10:56:44 AM , Rating: 3
Works like this:
-Amazon user buys music from Amazon or uploads already owned music
-Music gets saved to the Amazon user's cloud storage account
-Amazon provides an interface to stream the user's music to Android devices or web browsers
-Notably, the user still has full access to the files and can download or upload them at will

Amazon is essentially providing you with online storage, an "app" that lets you stream music from your online storage, and simple methods to get new or already owned music into that online storage. They're giving you another way to get at your own stuff, basically. With true streaming services (i.e. Pandora) you never "own" any of the music files.

RE: Gotta love it
By bighairycamel on 3/30/2011 11:22:42 AM , Rating: 2
From what I understand you can also download that music to any PC as long as you can access your Amazon account. This is probably where the mafRIAA will have a bitch-fit.

Also, why the hell would Amazon have to pay license fees to stream music already purchased and "owned" by a user and not streaming to the general public. That would be double dipping.

RE: Gotta love it
By zmatt on 3/30/2011 11:43:31 AM , Rating: 5
because as the RIAA has said in court cases before, they don't sell you the music, they sell you a license to listen to it on the medium you purchased it. i remember a year or two ago they tried to get ripping cd's and putting the mp3s on your mp3 player illegal, because they didn't "license" you to transfer the music form a cd to a digital device. Obviously they are nuts and this flies in the face of the concept of ownership.

RE: Gotta love it
By HrilL on 3/30/2011 2:09:29 PM , Rating: 2
Normal Audio CDs don't have DRM and thus you have the legal right to rip them under the DMCA because we always had this right in copyright law. It is called fair use. In the case of buying MP3 files directly and storing them online this should be considered perfectly legal as well.

A similar case was with The Comcast remote DVR. This proved in court that it doesn't matter where the media is stored as long as the user has a legal right to the content. While TV show and movies are slightly different. Time shifting is legal and it was ruled that it doesn't matter if the device is in your house or at a services providers location.

Amazon should be in the clear here and thus needs no licensing agreements. Where it could possibly get tricky would be if each account doesn't actually store its own music files. For example a lot of people will have songs purchased from Amazon and thus they'd only really need to store one copy of it and let all the users that own it have access but even trying a case of that would be a stretch since each user does in fact own the file in question and the courts would have to be filled with morons if they think the same bits are any different because they are owned by someone else.

RE: Gotta love it
By Solandri on 3/30/2011 2:12:46 PM , Rating: 5

This is the part most people have no problem with.
on the medium you purchased it

This is the part that makes absolutely no sense. They're selling me a license to read data off the media? WTH? I don't care about the media. I just want the data.

Their continual efforts to try to tie the data (music, movies, books) to the media are what's killing their business. By actively ignoring media-less distribution, they allowed iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon/Barnes & Noble to grab the lead in online sales and distribution. If you ignore market demand, your business deserves to die.

RE: Gotta love it
By nafhan on 3/30/2011 11:51:06 AM , Rating: 3
Yep, from a file point of view, it's just another place to have your stuff stored. Everything that Amazon is doing here, you could have done with any MP3 even before they rolled out these services. Amazon's just making it easy.

Requiring a streaming license seems ridiculous. You're just playing back your own files, it shouldn't matter if there's a network transit in between you and your file.

RE: Gotta love it
By Natfly on 3/30/2011 11:43:13 AM , Rating: 2
Which is exactly what you can already do with software like Orb and others. Have a central repository with the ability to stream anywhere you want.

RE: Gotta love it
By cjohnson2136 on 3/30/2011 1:12:50 PM , Rating: 2
Ok then I don't get what the record companies have an issue with. The user still has to buy the music. Amazon is simply giving the tools to play and store the music not get content.

