"Cloud Player is an application that lets customers manage and play their own music. It's like any number of existing media management applications. We do not need a license to make Cloud Player available."
That's Amazon spokesperson Cat Griffin's response to questions over whether the company's new music storage and playback services require licenses from the record companies to operate. Amazon seems to insist that since users are uploading and playing back their own music, the original download licenses still apply and no new licenses are necessary—a seemingly logical conclusion that the record industry disagrees with.
Amazon launched Cloud Drive and Cloud Player on Tuesday morning, offering US-based Amazon customers 5GB of online storage to use for whatever they please. If they buy an album from Amazon MP3, however, they get 20GB of storage for the year, and all Amazon MP3 purchases are automatically synced to the user's Cloud Drive without counting against the quota. Users could 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.
We wondered aloud how Amazon managed to strike such an impressive licensing deal with the record labels, given the fact that Apple seems to still be working out the details for its own digital locker service. It turns out that Amazon hasn't struck a deal, and seems to be hoping that the record companies will be the ones to blink.
"[W]e do not need a license to store music in Cloud Drive," Griffin added in an e-mail to Ars. "The functionality of saving MP3s to Cloud Drive is the same as if a customer were to save their music to an external hard drive or even iTunes."
That's certainly not what the music industry seems to think, though—at least in regards to Cloud Player. In an interview with Reuters, Sony Music spokesperson Liz Young said the company hoped for a license deal but that it was keeping its "legal options open." That doesn't sound particularly good for Amazon.
Another unnamed record company executive called the cloud services "somewhat stunning," adding that Amazon dropped the bomb on the music industry last week. Only then did Amazon allegedly begin to address licensing issues before going ahead with the launches—licenses or not. "I've never seen a company of their size make an announcement, launch a service and simultaneously say they're trying to get licenses," the anonymous exec said.
The non-Sony members of the Big Four labels—EMI, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music—didn't respond to our requests for comment by publication time, so it's unclear whether Amazon managed to secure any rights before launching Cloud Drive and Cloud Player. Based on Amazon's comments, though, it certainly sounds like the answer is no. The company has seemingly decided to call the music industry's bluff that new licenses are necessary when users stream their own music, and we're sure this won't be the last we hear of it.
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