Mac P2P Music Sharing with iTunes is Online

kraksmoka writes "Spymac.com has already found a way to take the new features of iTunes 4 to new heights. Today they opened up a new section on their site entitled Spymac Music, which is a database of shared iTunes libraries. Anyone who wants can submit their music library to be shared. Currently it sports a search engine capable of searching title, album and artist. " I wonder how long this will last.

Comments

As it was intended...

[kaamos]

... This is simpely an extension of what was provided by apple : You can have ANYONE with iTunes 4 stream your music over if you wish to, they only made an online DB with it... Guess it's time I finally afforded a mac...

Re:As it was intended...

[Oculus Habent]

Exactly. It's all streamed. There is copying or transferring. And realistically, there are physical limits on the ability of any one person to stream - bandwidth probably being the biggest.

It's a chance to see what other people like, and maybe find something new to you.

Why this won't live longin the public as is

[Lysol]

There were already some posts about this here a few days back.

I did try some other sites listed in those posts and I have to say that this is balancing on the dangerous zone. I could see the RIAA going after this specifically for that fact that there is little difference (if any), as far as they're concerned, with users 'broadcasting' stuff via iTunes vs. any other streamer.

I will not be suprised to see a few things happen:

1. all these public iTunes sharing sites will be shut down (or at least the biggest ones) via RIAA court orders
2. most of these public iTunes sites will simply turn off due to bandwidth limitations
3. Apple with either disable this feature in an update or publicly state that it is not meant for public sharing. Or some statement to that affect

That said, coupled with Rendezvous on a local lan, this is a pretty kick ass feature. :)

sahreitunes.com

[subrama6]

something else along these lines came out a few days ago

www.shareitunes.com

READ!!! Read the site!

[cshotton]

This site is just a public registry for people who are using the STREAMING capability of iTunes to play music for others. This is nothing more than a "guestbook" app that lets you publish a URL for your Mac running iTunes 4.

This is not P2P file sharing, it's not piracy, and it has already been discussed to death in the media over the past 2 weeks.

Re:READ!!! Read the site!

[Textbook Error]

so if i made a internet radio and streamed stuff to my friends i wouldnt need to worry about anything, and i could play any song i wanted without retribution?

iTunes does limit the number of clients that can connect (to 5 I believe), so I imagine this has already been taken into consideration. I find it hard to imagine that streaming between two arbitrary IP addresses (rather than just the local subnet) would get into a product as significant as iTunes now is for Apple if they weren't 100% sure that the record industry was OK with it.

I suspect the client limit was specifically to turn this from a "internet radio" situation into "play your CDs to a couple of your friends, just as if they'd come over to your house".

It took about 5 minutes after iTunes was released to people start sharing stuff across the net, and about 10 minutes before people were writing apps/php scripts to list active servers, so this has to have been cleared beforehand.

Re:they are asking for it

[wfmcwalter]

Corporations generally don't use their own legal departments to engage in litigation. The corporate legal folks are used for contracts, NDAs, employment law, intellectual property (patents, trademarks, copyright), government relations, and compliance (SEC, FTC, EPA, etc.).

Either to engage in, or to defend, litigation a large corporation would generally engage a law firm specialising in litigation, and probably one specialising in the particular type of litigation - employment, competition, IP, environmental, etc.

So the question should be "how big is apple's legal budget?".

Re:Apple promoting piracy?

[Textbook Error]

The shared file feature only works for INTRANET LAN's using Rendezvous.

Not quite - the discovery of servers on the local net is done with Rendezvous, but you can "share" (i.e., stream) music between any two IP addresses (if you're behind a firewall, you need to open port 3689).

You can NOT copy the files

[Seth Morabito]

Repeat after me:

You can't copy this files. It's streaming. It's not sharing in the sense of sharing files, it's sharing in the sense of sharing music that can be listened to only while the person sharing is online.

You can NOT copy the files.

Got it? You're not sharing files, you're sharing a playlist of streamable music, that's it. Person turns off sharing or goes offline, you can't play them. You can't copy them to your local disk. You just can't.

You can NOT copy the files.

So please do a little research before you jump all over this as music piracy. It's not a bug, it's a feature that Apple has proudly advertised.

Re:You can NOT copy the files

[Seth Morabito]

But it is magical! Because while you can easily get around it, iTunes is not automatically giving you permission to copy the files.

I stick by my statement, "you can not copy the files", but I'd better modify it because everyone's missing the point. "You can copy the data, but you can't use iTunes to easily copy the files to your disk without jumping through some third party hoops." There, happy?

You can use all sorts of hacks and workarounds and custom tools copy the stream and save it to your disk. But in all those cases you're working around the existing implementation.

If I don't have a deadbolt on my door, just a handle lock, am I giving you permission to enter my home without asking me? You can come in a window, or jimmy the lock, or slide down the chimney, it doesn't matter, you're still breaking the law. The point is, Apple is not giving you an easy way to copy the files. If you want to break the law, you have to go out of your way to do it.

Sheesh, nitpicky people.

This is not illegal in the US

[class_A]

Remember, the files are streamed and not copied to the client. There is no way within iTunes to copy music from a shared library to your own machine.

iTunes Music Sharing is limited to five concurrent clients, whether using Rendezvous or IP. I believe that this means it is exempt from the RIAA webcasting restrictions.

Tools such as Audio Hijack will allow you to record the audio stream to an AIFF in real time, but this isn't Apple's problem. Audio Hijack has many other legitimate uses.

Do ./'ers not think that Apple would have thoroughly investigated this before allowing sharing over the wider internet? "I know, lets negotiate with Universal, BMG, RIAA et al and then when we've got everything sorted, we'll really piss them off with a sharing feature!"

Think before posting :-)

OH YES YOU CAN!!!

[jzaw]

as long as the iTunes share is not passworded
then yes you can dl the mp3's directly from iTunes
its basic but works ok and creates fully tagged mp3s
queue up files

google for "itunesdl" or "itdlgui"

anyone who thinks that you cant ALREADY do this with iTunes ... didnt do their home work

for testing purposes only ... ive done this from canada to the uk ... it defo works!

[wink][tongue]

Re:Awesome!

[dfj225]

I hope Apple patches this hole...

Actually, this is not a hole in Apple's software. It is an advertised feature. If you want to blame someone, blame Apple, not the people using their software in a way it was designed to be used.