Friday, January 17, 2003 |
09:18 - The Fall of iCommunism
http://www.icommune.net/
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The makers of iCommune, an iTunes plug-in which allows users to share music over the network with a group of friends, has just been C&D'ed by Apple Legal.
Uh oh... I just received a "Notice of Breach and Termination of License" letter from Apple, stating that I violated my license to the Device Plug-in API which iCommune uses. For the time being, I'm making the download unavailable, while I try to sort things out with Apple. Sorry about this folks. Any good lawyers in the house?
I have a theory as to what happened, though. I'll echo something I just sent Aziz in e-mail:
What iCommune does is pretty similar to something Apple demoed as part of Jaguar (the ability to auto-discover and share other people's playlists via Rendezvous and stream music over the LAN); but Apple was compelled to back out of it silently under pressure from the RIAA and similar groups. (At least, that's the insinuation that I got out of one of the floor employees at MacWorld.) They called the demo a "technology preview", but I highly suspect that that's not what Jobs and Schiller intended it to be when they showed their playlists popping up on each other's iTunes on stage.
And since iCommune does the same kind of thing, I suspect that maybe Apple is under the same kind of pressure, being made to accept liability for that kind of functionality being added to iTunes. I'll bet the RIAA is already steamed at Apple for banking on the future of MP3s and device-shifting (patently flouting the RIAA's wishes); Jobs came out a while back, while accepting his Grammy for FireWire, firmly on the side of MP3 players and consumer rights. So the RIAA has probably just been waiting for the opportunity to claim that something of Apple's is a music-file-sharing application and put the squeeze on them.
Sure, it's not actually Apple technology that's creating the file-sharing functionality. But I imagine they're worried that if the RIAA were to start poking at them with a sharp stick, what they'd demand would be for iTunes itself to be axed. And that's not a legal battle Apple's interesting in fighting-- not a technological distinction they look forward to proving in court.
It's just speculation, but I think the pieces sorta fit...
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