

Amazon Cloud Drive Is Not Dropbox - semanticist
http://stream.thisisapipe.com/post/4185443892/amazon-cloud-drive-is-not-dropbox

======
trotsky
_I wouldn’t be surprised if a version of Dropbox that plays nicely with the
Cloud Drive is one of the first Cloud Drive apps on the scene. It makes a
great deal of sense. Instead of paying Dropbox for storage and syncing, we
could just pay them for syncing._

It seems rather unlikely to me that people would pay dropbox for their syncing
service to store things on someone else's paid storage. I would think that the
dropbox software exists to drive people to their relatively high margin de-
duplicated cloud storage subscriptions.

In a similar fashion it seems likely to me that Cloud Drive exists to drive
adoption & volume to Amazon digital music, a market that dwarfs the size of
the online storage game.

~~~
dcposch
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.

~~~
trotsky
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?

------
jrockway
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.

------
strickjb9
Is this typical of cloud storage? I read through their ToS and found that they
retain the right to access your files.

5.2.Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain,
use and disclose your account information and Your Files: to provide you with
technical support and address technical issues; to investigate compliance with
the terms of this Agreement, enforce the terms of this Agreement and protect
the Service and its users from fraud or security threats; or as we determine
is necessary to provide the Service or comply with applicable law.

~~~
khafra
Tarsnap doesn't do that, but other cloud storage providers seem to--like, say,
Dropbox:
[https://dl.dropbox.com/s/3vyon6umixkxu02/Dropbox%20Terms%20o...](https://dl.dropbox.com/s/3vyon6umixkxu02/Dropbox%20Terms%20of%20Service.pdf?dl=1)

~~~
joakin
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?

~~~
calloc
Read it again, you will see that "Your computer" is then limited to "Files
placed in" a certain location.

This is required for their service to work ...

~~~
joakin
I see the difference between Dropbox and Amazon terms, but I cant avoid asking
myself If legally they are just the same.

------
narkee
>It’s going to do something better: release an API and become a platform.

Isn't that what Amazon S3 already is?

~~~
staunch
Somebody should create a simple little app on top of S3 that runs on all your
devices and creates an automatically synced folder. They should make it free
for the first couple GB too.

Then Cloud Drive would seem kind of lame.

~~~
phamilton
For those who missed the sarcasm...

<https://www.dropbox.com/help/7>

------
podperson
Um: DropBox has an API. DropBox does version control. DropBox syncs.

Cloud Drive has no API yet. Doesn't do version control. Doesn't sync. (But it
is half as much per GB as DropBox.) Oh and it has a half-assed media player.

The problem is that unless you give us 50GB+ for free, the space difference
and cost difference are pretty much irrelevant.

~~~
kunjaan
I don't think what Dropbox does can be considered a version control. It has
versioning of some kind but is very mediocre.

I have had problems syncing large files using Dropbox between computers.

Plus I would never be able to afford $99 for 50GB for a year.

~~~
nhangen
_Plus I would never be able to afford $99 for 50GB for a year._

huh?

~~~
kanak
If your needs aren't met by dropbox's free plan, the cheapest plan they offer
is $99 for 50 GB a year.

In comparison, amazon is offering 100 GB for the same $100 a year, and even
has cheaper paid plans (e.g. $20 per year for 20 gb).

So, dropbox is currently expensive on two fronts; Amazon gives more GB/$ and
also has lower-priced plans for more modest needs.

This is a big win for some users, like kunjaan and me, because we haven't been
too thrilled with Dropbox's syncing abilities (tons of "conflicted copies"
everywhere). Furthermore, a large portion of our data doesn't need to be
synced; it simply needs to be available. This includes data like ebooks, music
collection, pictures.

~~~
nhangen
$99/year, regardless of whether Amazon is cheaper, is not expensive.

~~~
brianobush
or just find a bunch of people and refer them to dropbox. I have over 10 gig
just from referrals. Mind you then you become so dependent on it that once the
free space is in use, you will have to upgrade. However at that point, you
will gladly pony up $99.

------
dangero
This article is kind of backwards to me. Dropbox has an API, and Amazon didn't
release one with their Cloud Drive.

It's also kind of silly to say that Amazon has mastered storage, but give
Dropbox no credit. They obviously have data storage as a core technology.

Syncing isn't that valuable to me as a technology. Dropbox didn't invent it.
They borrowed it from elsewhere and Amazon could do the same if they wanted
to.

~~~
sorbus
> It's also kind of silly to say that Amazon has mastered storage, but give
> Dropbox no credit. They obviously have data storage as a core technology.

Dropbox buys their storage from Amazon, using S3.

~~~
dangero
Doh! I did not know that.

------
alexg0
The version 2 of dropbox he refers to already exists, it's called JungleDisk.
It works on bring your own storage (S3 and now few others), and you get to
keep your own crypto key. It added sync while back.

Been using it for few years, since I was not that comfortable put all my files
in the cloud.

------
girishkolari
According to me Amazon Cloud Drive -- is targeting to the users who have data
in cloud and want to get some better services around their data -- more
towards the amazon services, this is good for people who use amazon services.

Dropbox do more then what Amazon Cloud Drive does --- it is more concentrated
at data in your system and cloud storage as way to make it work.

Amazon CloudDrive is more on data at your cloud and Dropbox is a solution to
the data at you system. I still use my system as my primary storage for my
data -- for me Dropbox/IDrivesync make lot of value.

------
baddox
I don't know if I like the idea of a "Dropbox V2" that directly uses your
separately-purchased Cloud Drive storage. I use Dropbox for portable backups
of a few small but important files (my resume, todo lists, school assignments,
etc.). How would this proposed Dropbox work? Would it just put a separate
Dropbox folder in your Cloud Drive, separate from your music or whatever else
you put directly into Cloud Drive? Or would you purchase Dropbox and then use
_all_ of your Cloud Drive for Dropbox? I think it would be weird to use
Dropbox for all your music/photos/videos.

~~~
semanticist
I know several people who keep their iTunes Music folder on Dropbox so they
can use iTunes/sync iDevices across multiple machines.

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

------
phlux
I would like to see a hybrid between DropBox/Cloud Drive and AWS.

I would like a /sites/ folder into which I can drop webpages and have them
autohosted. It has the following structure:

/Sites/

\-->/root/ <\-- primary page @ in DNS

\-->/site1/ <\-- Subdomain1

\-->/site2/ <\-- Subdomain2

\-->/siteN/ <\-- Different DNS

Putting sites in /sites/ are actually hosted on AWS so that traffic surges can
be accounted for.

etc...

~~~
trotsky
I think it'd be fairly easy to put together a v1 quality script hosted on an
AWS instance to do that, provided the subdomains have been pre-provisioned or
you're ok with them all spinning up on a single instance.

~~~
phlux
<Picard>

Make it so.

</Picard>

\--I agree, but I think that this is a viable actual service model as well -
as opposed to a duct-tape scripting hack.

------
u48998
If Dropbox has picture viewer, why can't it have audio player?

~~~
vidar
They don't want to make the music industry mad is my guess, same for video and
movies.

~~~
vyrotek
I believe I read somewhere here on HN that DropBox actually only stores a
single version of a file. If you try to sync a file that someone else already
has then you never really upload the file. Your dropbox just has a 'pointer'
to the same file.

Seems like that would throw an interesting twist into the music/movie
copyright battles. You could in theory upload and consume a lot of content
that you never really 'uploaded'.

~~~
kanak
> I believe I read somewhere here on HN that DropBox actually only stores a
> single version of a file.

This is definitely true. For example, if you put a video show you got off of
eztv in your dropbox, the upload is instantenously complete. Why? because
someone else has already put that file into dropbox so you don't need to
upload it as well.

