It was only a matter of time: some enterprising software developer has written a program that allows Apple's iTunes for Windows to be used as a file-sharing program.
An independent software developer has created a program called MyTunes that lets users of Apple Computer's iTunes for Windows grab song files from other people on a computer network.
While iTunes' main purpose is to let people buy music online and play songs stored on their PC, the software also includes a feature that allows customers to listen to songs stored on another PC on their local network. Apple's software makes no permanent copy of the song, but the new MyTunes software captures that "stream" of music, making a copy that can be burned to a CD, uploaded to the Net or streamed to another PC. . . .
With the advent of MyTunes, the large iTunes collections become more like a collectively distributed database of songs from which anybody can download--something that looks a lot like Kazaa, although without the search features.
Only unencrypted MP3 files are easily captured and copied using the MyTunes software, however. Songs purchased from Apple's iTunes store, which are protected by the company's proprietary digital rights management technology, do not work with Zeller's software.
This development will no doubt be seized upon as an argument for why music files need to be individually protected with DRM rather than globally protected by a distribution scheme.