Digital

Amazon locker launches in UK

By | Published on Wednesday 19 September 2012

Amazon

Amazon’s digital locker service, complete with scan-and-match, has expanded beyond the US to France, Germany and the UK.

It means that British customers of the online retailer can now use the Amazon service to store back ups of their digital music collections, and then download or stream that music to any net connected devices. Meanwhile new music bought via Amazon MP3 will automatically appear in the digital locker.

Since last month the Amazon service also offers ‘scan-and-match’, so that users can have the system scan their MP3 collections and any music also in the Amazon libraries will automatically appear in a user’s locker, saving them the hassle of uploading those tracks.

Apple’s digital locker iCloud has always offered scan-and-match, but the Amazon service in the US initially didn’t, because the scanning function requires licences from the music companies, who were not involved in the original Amazon locker.

Technically an unlicensed digital locker – even without scan-and-match – could not have launched in the UK, where there is no ‘private copy’ right under British copyright law, that being the user right which (arguably) allows users to upload music to a central server even if the operators of that service have no licences from the labels and music publishers.

In the UK, Amazon customers can store 250 tracks in a locker for free, and up to 250,000 tracks for an annual subscription of £21.99.



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