A Legal Cloud Over Amazon Over Its New Cloud Player

In a very dramatic move, Amazon announced that its cloud file storage would now include a media player that will allow users to access and listen to their music files anywhere. Wow! Ok, if you missed the importance of that, it is OK. The reason for the excitement is that this move violates the legal agreements between all of the major music labels that think that when you buy that latest track you should not be allowed to store it on the cloud unless there is no way to stream it. They just want to make sure that music is never streamed for any reason unless someone has paid (them). And the question remains — Will the Music Industry try to kill Amazon Cloud Player?

Could Amazon’s Cloud Player Be Illegal?

Amazon’s cloud player move is a bold one, as it allows users to stream music, games, and other media directly from their cloud storage; one less tether to the old world PC concept that is keeping all of us from the freedom of the cloud. The real story is the Amazon cloud itself. The company does not just sell books anymore.

The Cloud Herders

There are many clouds in the sky and as they shift and move, it is hard to distinguish individual clouds, but they do exist. The Internet is full of clouds and one of the biggest providers is Amazon. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a major provider of on-demand, customized web 2.0 applications provision.

It used to be that if your company wanted to provide sophisticated Internet services to their customers they would need to build web servers, install and configure back-end software, and then begin to build the web applications. Now, you just call Amazon, buy the server capacity you need, and deploy. The capacity that you pay for is only what you need at any given moment, and if your needs increase, your capacity will increase as needed.

The types of services available range from simple web applications to sophisticated virtual private networking that allow partner business to monitor manufacturing operations, keeping an eye or their product orders, or outside programmers to access server files and work on projects-all this is ready to go at the touch of a button. A company could, in theory, ditch their in-house network servers and go completely cloud. While not many (if any) are going that far, most companies are moving more services to the cloud.

Have a load of customer forms that you want to index but lack the personnel?, Amazon’s mechanical Turk will take care of it for so many pennies per record. Need massive computing power to run those geo-location mapping files?, Amazons EC2 will provide all the processors and RAM you need, on-demand, and under budget, with no need to buy computers any more. The cloud is no longer an option or an interesting service and, in the near future, the cloud will become the real and only OS for many users.

HP has announced that its WebOS, the tablet operating system that it acquired from Palm, will be a gateway OS for its cloud services. This makes them one of the first companies to officially move the hardware OS in the direction of the cloud. We are all used to automatic updates, a necessary tether to the cloud that most OSs require. The WebOS moves the OS one-step closer to the cloud.

The End of Media Tyranny?

No, it is not the end, at least not yet, anyway. Amazon’s move regarding consumer cloud storage and allowing user to stream media will not have that dramatic of an effect. However, it does represent a major shift for the computing industry. It is now in the best interests of Amazon to move against record labels and media producers’ policies.

This will continue and could cause the media moguls to realize that in time, the Internet – and the threat it represents to the control of music and movie rights – will win.

Although not soon enough, it will cause a major rethink of media distribution and rights management. This goes back to the famous and prescient statement “The network is the computer” by John Gage. The cloud is the next stage of evolution in information technology.

The tablet is the most apt form factor for the new hardware, a viewer with short-term, local storage that fronts for the cloud. Media companies are simply trying to hold on to a much older time when music was only available on wax disks and radio paid good money for playing the pop songs.

Guest Author: This is a guest article by Jon T. Norwood is a managing partner at High Speed Internet, a site dedicated to providing information on Internet Providers and Technology. Jon can be reached at jon@velocityguide.com.