- Fires a Shot Across Google’s Android Bow
- Legal Issues Immediately Arise
This week, Amazon caught almost everyone by surprise when it launched a cloud locker service for music and other content, beating Google and Apple to the much-anticipated punch.
Amazon’s Cloud Drive, Cloud Player for the Web and Cloud Player for Android are live in the US. They let users store music on Amazon’s servers and access it from PCs, Macs and Android devices. We’ve also been able to get the service to work on a single-song basis on an iPad.
The service requires users to upload music to Amazon’s servers, and from there they can build playlists and playback either individual songs, albums or playlists. The service works with both AAC and MP3 files.
Anyone and everyone can sign up for the service and get 5GB of free storage for their music. Users that buy an Amazon MP3 album will automatically get upgraded to 20GB of storage for no extra cost and any songs purchased through Amazon MP3 don’t count against these storage limits.
The storage can be used for anything a user wants to back up. Regardless, music is the main focus right now, largely for two reasons: there’s a built-in player for songs, and Amazon MP3 is integrated. As storage goes up — whether through more offers or from users paying directly for it starting at another $20 — and if a video player is introduced, Hollywood may weigh in.
While most are seeing this as a direct challenge to Apple, Amazon appears to be actually positioning itself against Google to become the chief of Android content.
That is, unless the labels have anything to say about it.
“We don’t need a license to store music,” Amazon’s director of music Craig Pape said of the service. “The functionality is the same as an external hard drive.”
Maps of the ancient world often used the words “Here There Be Monsters” to mark unknown regions of the ocean. Here in the cloud, there be lawyers.
Amazon is in uncharted territory with the service since it encourages users to upload music for playback, but claims that it isn’t true playback that comes from the cloud, merely the download of a song and then playing the download through a dedicated music player.
The question is: if the content was purchased legally and Amazon isn’t streaming content that it acquired from its servers, is there any need for a streaming or performance license?
The answer is: We dunno and the law isn’t clear, but Amazon may still be in hot water.
Copyright law hasn’t caught up with the Web and the swift evolution of technology, so there’s nothing that really directly covers streaming or download services in terms of licensing. There’s no language covering the issue and since the law is unclear, there’s no real way to direct a challenge or be sure of one’s own safety.
MP3tunes has been fighting legal battles with labels over streaming rights and content management issues associated with locker services for a little over three years.
Amazon is pretty much in the same boat as MP3tunes — which offers a locker and playback just like Amazon’s Cloud Player — but Amazon’s dingy is a bit leakier since Amazon is also a music retailer, which means it has made licensing agreements with major labels covering what it can and can’t do, which will likely be used against it in a court of law.
The main thing that can be used against Amazon — we believe — is that it likely has an agreement with labels that prevent it from letting users download purchased content multiple times. Apple’s iTunes has similar restrictions as do most MP3 stores, so it’s relatively safe to assume Amazon has the same restrictions in its agreements. The problem here is that the cloud service basically allows users to do exactly this — upload their content from one location and download and play it from as many supported devices as they want.
Not only does Amazon appear to deliver an exact copy of the recording the user uploads — we verified this with recordings that Amazon presumably doesn’t have the rights to since they’re either not for sale or only for sale in one specified location that isn’t Amazon — but there’s an issue that may come up with its downloading. A report has surfaced that the songs will still play from Amazon’s Cloud Play even if the user blocks the application from actually delivering a download. We were shown this through a live stream and are working on verifying it on our machines.
Lawsuits are going to come over this—it’s only a matter of when. All Amazon can do to avoid them in time is secure licensing deals with the major labels, despite Pape’s initial words. Amazon is reportedly actively courting all of the major labels and many of the minor label groups, but it is going to have a tough time of it. Not only is Amazon possibly going against its current licensing and pushed a possibly infringing service through to users, but according to our sources the company didn’t give everyone much of a heads up — a week is the longest lead time we’ve heard about.
With all of this going on, it’s hard to focus on where Amazon is going with the service. There’s a lot of speculation that Apple is the key target since it is reportedly preparing a cloud-based music service with the revamp of its Mobile Me offering. Google is mentioned as collateral damage since it is also working on a cloud-based music service. We’d argue that these two need to be switched because of one key factor: Android.
Amazon recently launched its own Appstore for Android apps. The service covers a wide variety of apps and allows users to test drive apps for 30 minutes within their browser, meaning there’s no need for an initial download or payment. Not only does it allow users to test out apps, but this covers most of the favorite apps users have for Android. The Appstore even has a free version of the wildly popular Angry Birds app, which it bills as an exclusive.
Add this in with the announcement that Cellular South will sell the HTC Merge handset with the Amazon Appstore pre-installed, and Amazon seems to be in a key place to become the de facto locale for apps. Toss in a new music service from Android that works on your PC and Android device with no synching required, and there’s no need to load your phone with songs or wait for Google’s cloud service to come.
Since users can also buy songs from Amazon, which are automatically added to their cloud storage, they don’t have to open up multiple apps to get new content and then play it.
If Amazon can secure label licensing to keep it safe and then adds in a real-time recommendation engine, there’s no stopping it from grabbing some market share from the likes of Pandora, MP3tunes, Rhapsody and others. It’d even give Spotify some trouble if they ever make it into the US.
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