Peeve Farm

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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Thursday, May 15, 2003

13:04 - Is the party over already?
http://www.macslash.org/articles/03/05/15/0320251.shtml

(top)

Well, that didn't take long. Some of the iTunes-sharing databases (of which iTunesShare.com and iTuneShare.org are two, though there are others) have noticed a problem with publishing users' sharing lists.

While iTunes doesn't let you actually copy the MP3 or AAC files that you're streaming from a remote server onto your own machine, there are tools out there that let you capture the audio stream into a new MP3 file. With that added to the mix, iTunes' Music Sharing feature becomes just another means for petty morons to steal music. So SpyMac has taken their database offline.

David Benesch, one of the hackers who helped to decipher iTunes' DAAP protocol and publish its behavior, has this to say about the leeching programs that have already been developed around DAAP:

I am incredibly disappointed that these programs were developed. If you believe in file swapping or not, these programs have caused legitimate services to be taken down. More importantly, it's quite probable that Apple will remove this feature very soon. It could have been great. It could have been revolutionary. Stream, don't copy. Perhaps it was part of the great music compromise. Maybe it died in two short weeks.

I whole-heartedly support Spymac and others' decisions to take their sites down. It clearly became a source of illegal activity, despite it's legitimate intent. However, I encourage Apple to not give up on the feature, but take that Apple innovation to make it more secure. I believe streaming, combined with cataloging sites, can work great. If anyone at Apple is reading this, we were only trying to help. Don't give up on it completely.

It would certainly be annoying if Apple were to take out that feature; they've clearly been fighting for a long time (ever since the initial demos of Jaguar) to get the Rendezvous-showcasing Music Sharing into the hands of consumers, and we can only assume that its inclusion in iTunes 4 was the result of their hammering out an agreement with the labels, and an assurance that the feature wouldn't amount to yet another piracy tool. As long as the music was only being streamed (and people's upstream bandwidth was limited), there couldn't have been any real danger. But with stream-leeching software to worry about, built around the freed genie of DAAP and Music Sharing, this might well be a legitimate concern.

Some of the database sites (like ShareiTunes.com) have pledged to keep their resources online; others are following SpyMac's lead. I personally don't think that even with leeching software, the piracy concern is that big a deal; legitimate sharers can restrict or password-protect or disable their sharing, and illegitimate sharers have other sharing options anyway. The only unique weakness in iTunes' system is the ability for the ill-intentioned to buy music from the Music Store and then leave it open for remote leeching. But even that implies a perpetrator with the same mindset as someone who would buy music (either from the Music Store or on CD), recapture it into a DRM-less format via a loopback cable, and then send it out on KaZaA. If the labels weren't concerned with that chain of events for the Music Store itself, perhaps they ought not to be concerned about the same thing happening in the Music Sharing feature.

There's an intermediate solution, too; if Apple finds itself pressured to remove the ability to "broadcast" over the net (quotes because it's not really "broadcasting", it's browsed streaming), they could simply remove the ability to connect to remote hosts by IP address. Rendezvous users could still share music; Apple's model for Rendezvous networks is a family unit or household (or workplace), and that's a much smaller concern than streaming to strangers.

This may turn out to be a tempest-in-a-teapot sort of thing. I hope that once the Music Store really starts catching on, the whole concept of free music sharing will become generally pass�; who would want to go to all this effort to get free music when you can get it in better quality, legally, for a dollar a track? The only people Apple really needs to worry about here are those who steal music purely for the thrill of stealing music, not to actually enjoy the music for its own sake; they're incorrigible. But consumers who merely want music to listen to will find it in their interest, economically and ethically and qualitatively, to just buy it.

I may be being na�ve, but I think the latter outnumber the former.

UPDATE: Apple's attempts to prevent unauthorized hijacking of audio run deep. Here's what the developers of Snapz Pro X, which instantly crashes if you try to use it to get an iTunes 4 screenshot, noticed:

We know what this problem is, and it will be easily and quickly fixed. Essentially, in an apparent effort to enforce DRM, some of Apple's applications have a flag set on them that cause the kernel to uncerimoniously kill any program that attempts to pause them (as Snapz Pro X does).