Sony not Happy with Amazon Cloud Player – Rights or Wrongs?

When I wrote about Amazon’s free gift of cloud storage yesterday I thought that there may be some friction coming from those poor major record labels.

I was right and it comes from the destitute figure of Sony.

Amazons Cloud Player service lets you stream your music collection from the cloud to your computer or Android device.

Sony is not as happy as all those lucky Americans that are enjoying 5GB of free store and stream shannanigans – and it’s all about, as you’d expect, licensing for streaming rights.

Sony says that it ‘hopes’ that Amazon

“will reach a new license deal, but we’re keeping all of our legal options open.”

But Amazon has pointed out in no uncertain terms that:

“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.”

Which I think is fair point, don’t you?

Now, could Sony actually be a bit tetchy as Amazon’s free Cloud Player is rubbing Sony’s Music Unlimited streaming subscription service up the wrong way?

Do you think that Amazon is in the right or should Sony put its foot down and fight?