Amazon takes on music publishers in the cloud

Courtesy Daring Fireball, here's a piece describing Amazon's stance on paying music publishers royalties for music stored on Amazon's "new online music locker," Cloud Drive.

... Amazon resists any suggestion that it needs licenses for storage. The company tells paidContent: “We do not need a license to store music in Cloud Drive. 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.”

Bingo!

That is exactly the position that everybody outside the music industry takes, because it's the one that makes sense.

If Cloud Drive is what this article makes it sound like, an extension of one's personal music collection to the cloud, and access is limited to the collection's owner, then I would politely ask the music industry to shut the f--k up and stay the f--k out of the way, thank you very much.

Of course, somebody's always worried about pirated content:

But unless it was purchased through Amazon, the company has little way of knowing the music’s provenance—ie what’s been bought and what has, in some cases, been copied from someone else’s collection.

Correct, Amazon has little (probably no) way of knowing whence the content originated. And guess what? That's not Amazon's problem, as long as the content can only be accessed by the collection's owner. This is precisely how access to your own music collection works in your house. Any deficiencies in the model are beyond Amazon's control.

The music industry has an almost robotic tendency to respond to the concept of "online music access" by saying: "we'll take another piece of that."

No. Back the f--k off, you cretins.

Get this through your thick skulls: I am not a f--king pirate. Stop treating me like one.

I own every goddamned song in my collection, and I am not about to pay you another f--king penny for it.

When you sold it to me, the agreement was that I could listen to it as much as I liked, when I liked, where I liked. I'm holding you to that agreement.

As I've said before, any model of cloud-based access to music I own that requires ongoing payment of royalties to the music publishers is nothing more than a destructively greedy and illegitimate racket.

Amazon is sticking up for its customers. Good for you, Amazon.

(Disclaimer: I have never been employed by Amazon, nor do I own any stock in it.)

UPDATE: As I assumed, Amazon explicitly restricts access to the collection's owner. From Amazon Cloud Drive's official terms of use:

You may not use a name, username or email address that you are not authorized to use or share your Amazon.com username and password with others for purposes of allowing others to use the Service through your account.