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Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Amazon Cloud Player/Drive

It was pretty much inevitable but Amazon is now scrambling to figure out a way to placate the fistful of major record labels it apparently insulted by launching its Cloud Player and Cloud Drive last week. Wired has a really excellent summary of the situation available here.
I think this is going to be the defining copyright battle of the next 15-20 years that's going to define if we the user(s) really own our digital media and have the right or ability to store it where we want. The article's author sums this up nicely toward the end of the piece with the statement "As long as media companies think of file lockers as piracy devices, they will be at war with them". And as long as digital media is seen to be a threat to the media companies' profits, even if correctly purchased, any Internet storage options with the possibility of sharing are going to be strong and hotly contested. At some point these companies need to be convinced that users own the media that they buy. Hopefully this situation will help to push that resolution.
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