Crossplatform iTunes Sharing and Trading

An anonymous reader writes "As reported on Cnet and others, an open source java iTunes client named ourTunes has been released under the GPL by a group of anonymous hackers. Unlike the Apple iTunes for Windows and Mac, ourTunes allows a user to queue up and save to disk the music shared by other users. Recent court rulings have held that developers of p2p file sharing software cannot be held liable for 'for any copyright infringement committed by people using their products.'"

Comments

DMCA

[sploo22]

In light of the recent court decision, will Apple still be able to use the DMCA to bully Sourceforge into taking down the software?

Re:DMCA

[the pickle]

Well, the grounds for taking down PlayFair was that it removed the encryption.

AFAICT, ourTunes doesn't circumvent any copy-protection mechanisms, so as long as it isn't decrypting the DRMed AAC files and allowing people to play them who haven't actually purchased that music, it should be OK, especially in light of this recent court decision.

p

pretty neat

[MyDixieWrecked]

I live in an apartment with 6 other people (hooray for huge manhattan apartments!). 3 of them use iTunes and one has a HUGE collection of music. He's got close to 80GB total, and about 14000 songs in his itunes library alone. I have a feeling this will be faster than connecting through samba to his machine and copying... plus, I can browse easier...

I just tried out the program at work, here and transfered some songs from our PC music server. works nice. Although, it doesn't resolve a local iTunes server properly. Oh well, it's not like you wanna download from yourself, per se....

This is news?

[kabrakan]

Isn't this just a slow version of iTunes pre-version 4.5 with MyTunes? I haven't downloaded it but i've been using myTunes to download music off of my school network for months. Its an amazing source of files(depending what network youre on).

Uhhh....

[BenjiPenguin]

I don't see a problem with ourTunes... I mean, iTunes itself allows sharing within the local area network, ourTunes does the same thing, it doesn't extend beyond the current capabilities of iTunes (except it's actually more multiplatform).. So what's wrong with it? It looks to me as though it's just a way to let everyone utilize those features of iTunes, not just Mac/Winduz people.. Soooo.. Anyone that'd sue them over that is pretty messed up... Or maybe I just need to research this more... But I don't see anything wrong..

Hey Apple!

[teamhasnoi]

Why can't I add shared music from another instance of iTunes to a playlist on my local iTunes?

I have my music on an old G3 in the basement, and want to play it over the network from my powerbook.

As it stands, I can listen to what ever I click on, or in the default order - but no custom playlist or random order.

Again, DRM and 'copy-protection' annoys the casual user, without providing any return.

Download free music without getting in trouble

[MichaelCrawford]

Note that the court in the Grokster vs. RIAA only found that publishers of P2P software did not infringe copyright. Sharing or downloading music without the permission of the copyright holder is still copyright infringement, for which the RIAA can still sue you.

But there's a way you can enjoy free music downloads without getting into trouble. Listen to the legal music that many unsigned and independent artists provide as a way to promote themselves. Find out how in my article:

• Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads

If you downloaded such music instead of infringing copyright on the p2p networks, we'd make short work of the RIAA. You'd start listening to bands that aren't signed with RIAA labels, and the RIAA would have no cause to complain because no one's copyright is being infringed. The RIAA labels would wither away because no one is buying their music anymore, and a lot of deserving artists would get the exposure they deserve.

Here's a page that I found out about just a couple days ago and haven't added to the article yet. etree offers a page of Bit Torrent Downloads, all of them TradeFriendly.

If you feel as I do that more people need to read my article, you can help by linking to it from your own website, your web log, or from message boards. Be sure to email the link to all your friends who use P2P!

Limewire does it too, sort of

[BassZlat]

Limewire's DAAP implementation is actually working - you can share your downloaded files with other
people's iTunes on the local network.

I couldn't get ourTunes to even try and open the multicast socket, lets hope they get their act together sooner.

Re:For a second...

[weorthe]

Fine, send me a plane ticket and a few hundred bucks. What? You'd rather have a preview of what I sound like? Well I'll need a recording studio and a distribution channel. You'd rather just send me 99 cents online? How do I know you'll be willing to pay me directly when you won't even buy a CD?

Ripping off artists directly instead of indirectly ain't any fairer.

Re:Music has absolutely no value

[awl]

Even accepting your basic premise that the music itself is valueless (which I am not sure I do), I think you are still missing some things on the cost side. You say that it is reasonable for people to pay for bandwidth used in downloading the song.

This kind of assumes that the bandwidth is the only cost of getting that song to you. There are obviously a bunch of other costs associated with getting this particular manifestation of the song to the listener. These range from the obvious, like hiring a recording studio, to the less obvious, like food during the recording sessions. There is a long chain of things which needs to happen to get this particular copy of the song to you.

Previously, these costs were defrayed out of a combination of the money made from selling copies of the CD (or record or tape, or whatever), together with the money made from other sources, like concert tickets, merchandising, etc. If the revenue from selling copies of the music is removed, then the prices of the other items would need to rise to cover the lost revenue.

That is a valid business model, and some bands choose to make their music available for free in order to attract more business in those other areas (or of course because they want to do so for artistic, egotistic, or altruistic reasons and they don't need the money).

Other bands want to continue to make money from selling copies of their music, and choose not to make copies of their songs freely available. Society as a whole also recognizes this as a valid business model, and defines the rules by which this can be done. As a customer you are paying not directly for the media on which the song is distributed (though you can bet the record company will include this cost in their price), but for limited rights to use the music so purchased. These rights are broadly described under the heading of fair use, and include things like being able to listen using different devices and making backup copies, but not going into business and selling copies or giving them away to all and sundry.

It is perfectly fair to argue that society shouldn't recognize the second business model (which is what I think you are arguing), but that should be on the basis that it is disadvantageous to society in some way, or that it infringes the rights of the individual, and not on the basis of whether a song is worth something, or whether music wants to be free (which I know you didn't say - I am (unfairly) generalizing... ;-)

If bands for whom the first model doesn't work well don't have the option of the second model, then they may simply stop recording and find other jobs. I am not arguing for a second that the world owes such people a living, but their liberties (and livelihoods) would be being infringed, which needs some justification. They are currently choosing to produce music on the basis that when they sell you a copy, you agree to abide by certain terms and conditions of the sale. They do not appear to be causing any disadvantage to society by doing so. Their alternative would be not to sell their music, which would only disadvantage folks who were prepared to pay for the priviledge - by removing this right now nobody has their music.

I don't want to ramble (more), so to sum up (and these are general points not addressed to the parent poster):-

A: If you don't believe a recording of a song should cost more than the bandwidth to download it, then download songs that have been made available on that basis (of which there are many).

B: If you don't want to abide by the conditions of sale when purchasing music which has not been offered for free download, live without the music.

C: If you want to use music of which you have purchased a copy in a reasonable way, then hey, that's what your fair use rights are for.

D: If you think your fair use rights should be broader than they are (or where DRM limitations interfere with you fair use rights), campaign to have them changed (including saying so as often a

Re:Captin, she cant take much more of this

[AstroDrabb]

or Apple will code something in to stop the third party client from working with their software.

Huh? And exactly how long would that last? If Apple can manipulate bits, so can any other geek and undo or work around what Apple "wants". This is a good thing (tm) to me. Why should apple say how you can share your music and with what platform? Anything apple tries will be undone by geeks.

How I would like to pay for music...

[IBitOBear]

eh.. how about "not in some way that presumes I am a crook."

This would also be my perferred way to pay for games.

Quite frankly, I am *pretty* sure that I, or my roommate, have paid for every game I have played that wasn't free.

Can I make the same assertion about music? Only kind of. Back in the day I did some napsterizing, but all of that was experimental. That is, I never napsterized anything that I wanted to "own" but I did do a lot of pick a song, check out the playlist of the user that had that song, download things that looked interesting. Can't say that I listened to much, if any of that more than once.

My roomate is into audio production and I am into writing. We naturally have these conversations about theme and content. So somewhere I think I *still* have nine versions of "little bunny foo foo." They are all *quite* terrible.

In its heyday Napster was very much the Star Trek experience of "computer, find me citations on (x)" querying, even if it was just music.

And honestly, I don't know that I have scrubbed out every reference to every song that was so fetched. I also think that several other people had access to the one computer as it was a house resource for brief period of extremity.

I say all this because if there had been a way to take the song tracks that I had already fetched and use them as a key to a payment system. I'd have done that on several occasions.

The way iTunes etc work, you pay your money and then you take your chance.

Given god like powers, or the money and title to make things different I'd do the following.

1) offer a large catalog of music (in fact every title I could, no exceptions) for free download at "good quality" (at least 128bit mp3, possibly more).

2) provide an app with a big drag-and-drop target (etc)(sort of a Big Red Button). When you take the free title and apply it to the app, it sends of a dime or two to The People Who Deserve Money(tm).

2a) the app would then let that computer download "really high bitrate" versions of that same song. Yes, it is only the one computer that is so authorized, and no, the good copies are not DRMed to be frozen to that box or anything like that. I wouldn't even bother to brand the high bitrate songs as comming from that computer.

2b) even the high-bitrate titles from 2a could be dropped onto the Big Red Button (on a different computer) to send money to those who deserve to be paid.

2c) using the Big Red Button will also get you money off credits for songs containing that version of that title on full CD purchases from the attached online store.

3) provide the old napster structure of search and share, and wire it up to automatically carry the free-quality songs freely.

4) treat the persions who pay for the very-high quality tracks not to spread them around, as the "good quality" tracks are available to everyone.

5) generally treat the customers as nominally honest and dignified humans.

5a) the very-high quality tracks are suitable for burning of CDs and the people are encouraged not to share these, and the napster-like applicaiton would be "resistent" to sharing these version, but they are not blocked from doing so by DRM or "playlist burn counts" etc.

So the p2p system removes my cost to distribute. The people who are "Causal Copiers" will be given all the music they want (a-la radio) and those who want more are going to get more by paying money. Marketing is automatic and quite rich, the whole "persons who have this song also have these" is implicit. Money is to be made at the low and high end. The "illicit feeling" is removed from the transaction. And most importantly, you know exactly what you are getting with every purchase, so quality must be good and there will be no "the rest of the album sucked" or "this wasn't what I thought it was" problems because there is no risk to the purchaser.

It could be done cheaply and it would work.

(Consider... Napster is the only reason that I ever bought Green Day... 8-)