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Amazon Cloud Player upsets Sony Music over streaming license, Amazon shrugs By Richard Lai posted Mar 30th 2011 2:26AM In case you missed the news, last night Amazon gave us a little surprise by launching its free Cloud Player service, which lets you stream your music collection from the cloud to your computer or Android device. While this has no doubt put a smile on many faces (American ones only, for now), Sony Music isn't too happy about Amazon jumping the gun over licensing for streaming rights. The record label told Reuters that it's hoping Amazon "will reach a new license deal, but we're keeping all of our legal options open." Yikes. In retaliation, Amazon responded with the following statement to Ars Tehcnica: "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. 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." Of course, the bigger story here is that Amazon's free Cloud Player is going head-to-head with Sony's Music Unlimited streaming subscription service, which was pushed out last month after plenty of money talk with various record labels. Understandably, Sony isn't willing to let Amazon cut through the red tape here without a fight, and this may also affect similar music locker services like mSpot and MP3Tunes, albeit at a much smaller scale. In fact, Sony's already expressed its discomfort with those particular companies' mode of operation, so you can probably expect to see this tension boiling over to some form of legal action before long. Now that a big shot like Amazon's involved, it's almost inevitable.

For the tl;dr

Sony wants some money because Amazon allows you to stream music you owned.

I hope Sony tries to take Amazon to the cleaners and Amazon kicks their legal ass. I think Sony has gotten alittle trigger happy sueing everyone. Someone needs to teach them how to play nice and stop cyber bullying. Though I still think Sony had every right to sue some of the hackers.

However I have heard about sueing cell phone companies, hackers and now Amazon. Sony sued accouple times when NDA's were apparently violated. Sony is willing to take anyone to court. If Amazon wins Sony might finally stop sueing everyone.

If Amazon looses God help us!

I never thought I'd look at the tech industry and see some of the stuff companies like Apple and Sony are pulling and think to myself "hey, Microsoft isn't that bad".

I mean, come on, Sony.

Honestly, I used to dislike Microsoft. Up until Sony out-done it and I no longer hold a grudge against MS anymore.

And people wonder why they don't want sony having so much control of their products after you buy them. Its cause they would charge them for everything and anything they can. I mean come on people already bought the music, its theirs. Amazon is mereley providing cloud storage space for their music and sony wants a cut of the pie.

EVERYBODY used to dislike Microsoft. It's kind of amazing how they've rebranded themselves into a much more friendly entity over the past ten years.

I'm dissapoint. Though it's no surprise for me seeing as SONY likes to act though. I like their products, but not their behaviour as a company.

It's just how far IP laws are being stretched lately.  Seriously, companies are acting batshit insane about it.  I mean, Micorosoft is trying to pass laws so that if any company related to a product used a pirated copy of excel then the final product can't be sold unless the final operator pays microsoft damages and a royalty even though there is no way the final company could know if some random supplier pirates excel.

I knew it would eventually come to them trying to charge us for using the content (which Sony is doing explicitly through the subscription-based system)

ANd here I thought Sony couldn't do anything for me to think of them as a terrible business than suing people for modifying hardware they bought with their own money, or using a rootkit as DRM.

I was wrong.