Just when it seemed like there couldn’t be any more exciting copyright news in one week, Amazon launches a cloud storage service aimed specifically at music. Copyright and music are simultaneously the best friends and enemies; we need copyright to have music (maybe), but the music industry has been spending more money on copyright infringement lawsuits in the last decade then they could ever hope to get back in the courts.
Amazon’s Cloud will surely lead the music industry back into court. It’s a free, 5 gig storage on the web that can be accessed from any internet device (except for iphones…), or 20 bucks for 20 gigs for a year. You upload your music, and it stays in your Cloud to be accessed wherever. Amazon has no plans to pay any content creators, which, if you ask me, is fine. Everything you upload has to be yours to start with, so I’m not even sure what the copyright claim could be, especially given Cablevision, which allowed essentially the same and more for television shows. But the music industry is apparently stunned by Amazon’s move, and now sitting with lawyers in wait hoping for somebody to find a flaw in a system that Amazon’s own lawyers no doubt spent months examining themselves.
I don’t actually think Amazon will see that much success with Cloud, though I admire their brash entry into a space filled with copyright timebombs. Amazon made a big mistake in not allowing access via an iPhone, though. I’m not sure what motivated that decision: Apple is obviously a competitor in music distribution but denying the value of mobile access to a huge number of your potential users is going to cripple the technology’s adoption rate. And it’s hardly like Google, purveyor of the Android platform on which a Cloud app will be released, is that much less of a threat to enter the mobile music storage space. Anecdotally I’ve heard that the upload client doesn’t work on Linux and the site for it crashes on Chrome, and it doesn’t work at all on Opera, so I’m not too certain this launch isn’t already a disaster. At least the copyright blogs are talking about it!
danielmarkmiller.net 