Amazon Auto-Rip, a positive step toward unified online digital rights management

from Mashable
Amazon's AutoRip Gives You Free MP3s for CDs You've Purchased:

My Amazon Cloud Player. There are double arrows beneath
the albums added automatically today by Auto-Rip

I got this news on Mashable today.  Amazon has gone live with a service that closely mirrors the digital ecosystem ideas I recommended a few months ago.  Auto-Rip mines your account for the record of all the physical CDs you've purchased from them since 1998.  It automatically adds digital access for that CD content to your online library via the Amazon Cloud Player. You don't have to manually rip or upload anything yourself,

The breakthrough idea is this: Amazon has decoupled the rights to the content from the delivery mechanism.  They effectively acknowledge that the money I spend for content--the music--means I have rights to it on a CD, online, or as a local download to my personal devices.   This is a cool service, but it's part of a Big Idea, stateless data, applications, and devices.

Take note: especially if Amazon extends this idea to video, books, and applications, they will have changed the game and the business model for content sales.  Why would I buy from anyone else unless they recognize that I'm buying rights to content, not the physical thing that holds it?

The next logical extension will apply to third-party streaming of content I've paid for.  Pandora, for instance, can mine my digital rights and steam me my own content without paying a broadcast license fee to do so: it's microcasting, not broadcasting.

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