Amazon’s just unveiled its Cloud Drive, including a Cloud Player, enabling you to upload your music and then play audio across PCs, Macs and Android-based smartphones. This is massive and the sort of thing people were hoping Google and Apple would do, but Amazon’s got there first.

This also means Amazon’s the first to test the murky legal situation of back-ups. In the UK, fair-use laws barely exist. The 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act in theory enables you to make a copy of software and games, although it’s in part been superseded by the Copyright And Rights Regulations act, which stamps all over the prior law by making it illegal to exercise your rights should you circumvent copyright protection technology.

In music, things aren’t any clearer. There’s a general misunderstanding in the UK that it’s fine to make copies of music you legally own; in the old days, that meant transferring vinyl to cassette for your Walkman, and now that means ripping CDs to a PC or Mac, or (technically) making copies of digital audio files by placing them on an audio player or smartphone. Interestingly, the BPI (the UK equivalent of the RIAA), while generally taking a typically hardline stance towards filesharers (ZeroPaid), announced in 2006 that it would refrain from suing people making copies of purchased music for their personal use (Macworld). BPI chairman Peter Jamieson said:

Traditionally the recording industry has turned a blind eye to private copying and has used the strength of the law to pursue commercial pirates.

We believe that we now need to make a clear and public distinction between copying for your own use and copying for dissemination to third parties and make it unequivocally clear to the consumer that if they copy their CDs for their own private use in order to move the music from format to format we will not pursue them.

This is an eminently sensible decision, of course, but, importantly, it is at odds with UK law. Therefore, while Jamieson once said this, there’s nothing to stop the BPI changing its mind, being overruled by another party, or from some other organisation (such as a record label) suing you for ripping your CDs.

Naturally, then, this also means Amazon’s in the same position. According to the Guardian, Amazon claims it can circumvent rights legislation by claiming its online storage is the equivalent of an external hard drive. Craig Pape, director of music at Amazon, said:

We don’t need a license to store music. The functionality is the same as an external hard drive.

But note who (or rather what) that quote is referencing: Amazon. In other words, Amazon is indemnifying itself and putting sole responsibility for rights issues on to the user. Now, this is fine, because it’s the same as any other online service, but in this case Amazon is suggesting to users that they use Cloud Player for their music. In effect, Amazon is directly tempting people to break the law, but noting that it won’t be liable for any comeback.

I’m wondering how record companies will react. If they’re smart, they won’t care, since Amazon’s offering is a step up from the likes of Spotify in encouraging you to upload content, which you may have bought legally in some format. Most importantly, I’m also wondering how the law will react, because if Amazon’s service says anything, it’s that the UK desperately needs fair-use (i.e. copying of media—across formats, if necessary—for personal use) utterly enshrined in law.