Amazon Cloud Drive Is Not Dropbox

What the hell, never knew about this:

  Consent to Access Your Files 
  BY UTILIZING THE SITE, CONTENT, FILES AND/OR SERVICES, 
  YOU CONSENT TO ALLOW DROPBOX TO ACCESS YOUR COMPUTER 
  TO ACCESS ANY FILES THAT ARE PLACED IN THE 'MY DROPBOX',
  'DROPBOX' FOLDERS, AND/OR ANY OTHER FOLDER WHICH YOU
  CHOOSE TO LINK TO DROPBOX.
  

Is this intended for the program to access the files and send them to the server? Or does this mean the bad thing, that nothing is really private?

Cloud Drive is one thing, but I think that Cloud Player has the really interesting, disruptive potential with respect to services like Pandora, Last.fm, and even Youtube and ITunes.

People listen to a lot of music on each of those services. The way I see it, each is just an approximation of the holy grail: the ability to listen to any song, anytime, on demand, for free.

Youtube comes close, but it has quite a lot of music that's only available in low quality and quite a bit that's blocked on copyright grounds.

ITunes fulfills the other requirements, but is not free.

Pandora is free, on-demand, and high-quality, but you have limited control over what you listen to and they have fairly disruptive audio ads.

Cloud player could come closer to goal.

I think Cloud Player could benefit indirectly but massively from the fact that music piracy is common. Many people I know (and, I'd venture, many people on HN) have music libraries in the tens of GB--obviously not obtained by paying $0.99 per song.

How could Amazon offer, say, 100GB for a small enough price (much smaller than the current $100/year for Cloud Drive) ? You mentioned that Dropbox does deduplication.

There's huge overlap between most people's music collections. Quite a few IPods I've seen contain exactly the same 500MB Beatles' discography. It's an awesome use case for deduplication. I think that as long as they restrict uploads to music (and, perhaps, movies), they could pull this off for surprisingly little storage cost on their end.

Combine it with the aggressive CDN strategy they already have (to reduce bandwidth costs), and you could have the the next killer music app. Imagine your own curated, high quality music collection, streamed to you anywhere for a buck or so per month, with the app available for free on all the major platforms.

When you consider two markets

  a) digital content sales (amazon mp3 store)
  b) paid cloud music host for pirates

Selling MP3's is clearly a superior business, and they are to some extent at odds with each other. What's more, we know that Amazon has contractual relationships with the majors and plenty of other music players. If they defacto condoned piracy they could end up getting a lot of grief over it from their partners.

Note that storing your pirated files on the service is against the TOU:

You must ensure that you have all the necessary rights in Your Files that permit you to use the Service without infringing the rights of any copyright owners, violating any applicable laws or violating the terms of any license or agreement to which you are bound

And they have the right to inspect your files to ensure, among other things, your compliance with the TOU:

You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files: [...] to investigate compliance with the terms of this Agreement, enforce the terms of this Agreement

Whats more, the way music is commonly pirated means many illicit copies will have very common and identifiable names and hashes. The way amazon will be doing de-duplication means they'll automatically have indexed lists of every user that has a copy of each file without even trying to make one.

While I'm unsure if they'd want to do anything about it for PR reasons, given their interests and those of their partners I certainly wouldn't suggest using Cloud Drive for files you don't have legitimate rights to.

In a bit of an unlikely what-if scenario, imagine Amazon + Warner Brothers offering you a one time chance to pay $3000 to buy all the questionable music in your account or they'll refer the matter to their attorneys?

I'm looking forward to an API that lets third parties add files to your Cloud Drive. Buy music, get it in your Cloud Drive. Buy a netbook, get the restore CD image in your Cloud Drive. Buy a DVD, get it in your Cloud Drive, etc. Amazon seems to be thinking about this in terms of "when you buy music from your phone it ends up in Cloud Drive", but what I want is for every bit of data I ever pay for to end up here. Because upload speeds are super-slow: it would take hours for me to upload that restore CD. But downloads are fast. So do the uploads Somewhere Else once, and let everyone else download it from their Cloud Drive.

If the labels ask, it's Dropbox. If the users ask it's Grooveshark.