Are Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player Legal? 226
Fudge Factor 3000 writes "Earlier this year both Google and Amazon introduced cloud music storage where users could upload their music and listen to it wherever they had an internet connection. The music industry, however, was up in arms because they believed that Google and Amazon had to pay additional licensing fees for their music storage services. Tim B. Lee at Ars has written an excellent summary of the legal issues surrounding these services. His ultimate conclusion is that Google and Amazon would probably withstand any legal assaults, but it still remains a tough call."
Re:deja vous, anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
It's not greed. It's stupidity.
They rejected every deal these services had to offer, not realizing the obvious financial advantage of having an agreement before launch. They walked, and now they have to play legal catch-up in order to ultimately get probably less than they would have gotten if they had just agreed to the worst deal.
Sigh. Someone on the negotiating team should have known that these companies feel that they could absorb whatever the costs of being sued would be and still walk away profitable. But they didn't. So they have the business sense of gnats.
MP3.COM did this already and lost horribly (Score:2, Informative)
MP3.COM had the "My.MP3.com" feature, which let users stream music from CDs that they had registered with the site. Universal Music Group sued them and cost mp3.com $53 million in judgements and legal fees.
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)