Amazon and their digital cloud music.

Factual Questions
1

Amazon has recently started offering a new digital music service.
For about 50,000 CDs, if I’ve bought the physical discs from Amazon at any time in the last 15 years, Amazon is adding a digital version of those songs to my account in their cloud service. I can listen to the songs from there, or I can download them as an MP3.

For Christmas this year, I gave my sister a CD. It turns out that this CD is one of the 50k that Amazon has on their list. If I had bought the CD, opened the package, ripped the contents to a hard drive, and then given the CD to my sister, I believe I could be found guilty of some form of music piracy.

What about in this case? Amazon never asked me if I intended to keep the CD. There is no mechanism to verify that I still have the physical disc in my possession. Is it legal for me to keep a copy of the digital music, even though I gave away the physical disc?

Or is this a case of Amazon giving me a digital copy, downloadable, at zero cost, and I can do with it what I will?

2

I don’t know what the official, legal answer is to your question, but there is currently a MPSIMS thread about this very issue: Huh. So Amazon just turned me into a music pirate.

3

Do you think amazon doesn’t have a legal department?

and

Do you think amazon would put almost their entire customer base at risk for being charged with music piracy?

4

So does the Mafia, Zetas, Church of Scientology, etc. That doesn’t mean that everything (or anything, for that matter) they do is legal.

From here: CNET: Product reviews, advice, how-tos and the latest news
"When Amazon launched without licenses, label executives were saying that they didn’t concede that Amazon’s store was legal. They said much the same last November, when Google’s cloud was launched without licenses.

Now, Google is the only service among the big three without a licensed service. The company remains in negotiations, but there’s no telling when a settlement will be reached."

Stranger things have happened in the online music world.

5

Thanks for pointing out the MPSIMS thread. I hadn’t seen that.

I think that Amazon has a legal department that reads things in the best light for Amazon. I also believe that Amazon would introduce something like this, to increase their digital music and cloud market, with the understanding that they might get in trouble, but they can always say “We can’t control what our customers do with their digital music files.”

6

So can you tell us what you think they said?

7

Again, what would the public perception be if Amazon introduces a non-opt-outable ripping service for their customers who are then sued by the RIAA for music piracy? Do you think Amazon would be willing to deal with that fallout?

The rips are sent to a cloud account accessible only by the account holder. No one is going to get sued simply for having a cloud account with rips in it because neither amazon nor the RIAA know if you possess the CD or not. They’d have to upload the rips to a filesharing site or torrent.

8

Well, in my case (Amazon MP3 Android app on an Android smartphone), the track is also downloaded to the phone, DRM-free. Probably watermarked, but not obviously encumbered, so I could put the tune up on a torrent if I were feeling stupidly generous.

And I’m pretty sure you can download anything in the cloud storage to a PC using their website or their little PC cloud management application.

So, in theory, you probably could buy the CD and give it to someone else, while keeping the MP3 version on your own PC or smartphone (or leave it on the cloud storage service).

ETA: Which seems to be the precise point of the MSPIMS thread mentioned earlier.

9

Amazon asks you if it is a gift during the checkout process. This is probably enough to absolve them of any responsibility should you give the media away.

I’d like to know what mechanism the RIAA would use to identify disks that were subsequently given away. They can’t just sue everyone and hope it sticks. They would need a way to identify who no longer possessed the physical media but was still using the digital media before they could take any legal action. How would they do that?

10

Actually, they can and have. They sued huge numbers of people based on IP addresses alone. It was a “shock and awe” campaign that scared many into settling out of court.

11

The thing is, if you bought a CD 12 years ago to give it to someone else, you would have no way of knowing Amazon would do what they did. Why should you declare it as a gift when you might want to wrap it yourself or whatever? If anybody gets sued due to Amazon’s one-sided action in this matter, the fallout would be gigantic. Remember when Amazon deleted unauthorized copies of “1984” from customers’ Kindles? Yeah, except this would be much, much worse…

12

I might have expected Amazon to say something like “If you no longer possess the physical CD, you are obliged to delete the MP3s from your Cloud Player,” but I haven’t seen anywhere where they’ve actually said this.

(I have seen that they’ve said that if you buy an “AutoRip” CD from them and then return it, they’ll delete it from your Cloud Player, and if you’ve downloaded it before they’ve had a chance to delete it, they’ll charge you for the MP3 album.)