Copyright laws say you're allowed to make a backup, right? (Despite the slimy music industry's past $100,000 fine per song, per incidence former legal threats against such laws?

Well that comes under the heading of which copyright law and where...... Here in the UK, for example, I don't think it's strictly legal to create a backup copy of installation medium or original music CDs anymore (though everyone knows that pretty much everyone copies their CDs to iTunes (or equivalent) and then copies onto iPod (or equivalent) these days. And for anything protected by encryption, we now have legal provisions similar to DMCA (i.e. it is illegal to try and circumvent a copy protection mechanism, regardless of how poor that mechanism is).

One of the reasons I still have a soft spot for the CD is that there's no copy protection and therefore no technical limits on how I, as a consumer can use the content.

Google is too big to launch this without knowing for sure that they'll be able to keep it going. Sooner or later, Google will have a music store, and I doubt the music industry will want to throw away all that extra income.

Right you are. And next will be Google Films.

What do you call a trillion terabytes of storage?

anything you want. you own it and there's no copy protection.

Decent service that's better than Amazon's streaming at the moment. For obvious reasons being able to interact better with other Google services would be nice but I'm sure the Record Label geniuses would crap their remaining brains out if that happened

Except for all of the music you bought on iTunes when there was copy protection

you can upgrade it to the non-copyprotected version, which is also a higher quality too.

At an additional cost.

I've been an Apple guy since the Apple IIc, though I don't purchase any music from iTunes. I use Amazon's MP3 store for popular artists, or purchase from the artists or independent record labels own MP3 stores for stuff not on Amazon.