Following its launch at the start of the week, licensing doubts are now surrounding Amazon's Cloud Drive service.
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Copyright holders, however, are calling into question just how legal the service actually is.
Sony Music was the first of the majors to come out and declare that it had no licences at all in place with Amazon for music to be used in this way. Spokesperson Liz Young told Reuters, "We hope that they'll reach a new licence deal but we're keeping all of our legal options open."
Amazon has countered that it does not need any licences. It issued a statement to ArsTechnica saying, "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 licence 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."
One label Music Week spoke to, wishing to remain anonymous, said that its only deal with Amazon was for downloads on Amazon MP3 and that this agreement did not extend to any cloud-based usage or full-track streaming.
