Sony Vs. Amazon: Who’ll Win the Streaming War?
By danseitz
As you might be aware, yesterday Amazon launched the Cloud Player, a service that stores your music and lets you play it from anywhere you have a decent connection and a computer. No more copying MP3s, no more carrying around a music player, instead you’ll have your music anywhere you go, at least until the server crashes. Or until Sony shuts it down, as they just told Amazon they’re pretty sure the Cloud Player needs a streaming license.
This is, of course, in absolutely no way whatsoever motivated by the fact that Cloud Player is utterly free, while Sony’s cloud music system is a subscription service, and thus Amazon punched Sony right in the groin.
Oh, my, no. Not at all. Sony never ever behaves like that.
Amazon, for its part, says that because the music is purchased, and all they’re doing is offering access to music the customer buys, that they don’t need any sort of streaming license.
We’re going to take a wild guess and say that Sony is just rattling its saber to try and get Amazon to back off, and that Amazon won’t. Hooray, it’s another ridiculous protracted court battle over music and consumer’s rights to the product they purchased! Just what we needed!
