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Only days after the appearance of Internet-based music streaming services that capitalize on Apple's ITunes technology, many of the Web sites that hosted them have removed the feature, citing concerns about piracy.

Apple ITunes Music Store is the company's wildly popular new online music purchase site, which made its debut April 29. It has already rung up more than 2 million downloads, even though the service is limited to the relatively small number of Apple Macintosh users.

The new online service allows Mac users to download songs from a library of more than 200,000 songs for 99 cents each using a special software client.

Within days of its first public release, however, programmers outside of the company found ways to expand ITunes' reach. They harnessed an ITunes client feature called Rendezvous that enables Mac users to share downloaded songs with other systems on a LAN or over the Internet.

Extended Service

Sites such as Spymac.com, ShareITunes.com and Itunesdb.com began offering music streaming services that allow registered users to browse and search the collections of other ITunes users, then listen to those songs streamed over the Internet.

The sites relied on the work of programmers who had deciphered a protocol that ITunes uses to stream music, according to David Benesch, a Williamsville, New York software developer.

Benesch cracked the protocol, named DAAP, as a "weekend project." He said he figured out how to pull information out of a command in the protocol that is used to transmit the name of the artist and song.

Benesch provided his code to Spymac.com after the Apple enthusiast site expressed an interest in using it as the basis for an online ITunes stream sharing service, he said.

Benesch's code enabled ITunes users to display their song catalogs online through Spymac.com's music site. But other developers went further, figuring out how to capture the actual music stream from ITunes, Benesch said.

Within days of the new Web-based ITunes databases appearing, tools with names like "ILeech" appeared that enabled users not just to listen to songs streamed from another ITunes user's music database, but to copy them. The tools turned the new services into the foundation for an online file swapping service, Benesch said.

While listening quality varies for songs streamed over the Internet, especially when the user hosting the song has a low bandwidth Internet connection, songs ripped from streamed MP3 or Advanced Audio Coding files would be identical in quality to the originals, Benesch said. (MP3 and AAC are both file formats for storing compressed audio data.)

Service Shut Off

In response to the growing concern about stream ripping tools, at least two ITunes streaming sites shut down on Wednesday, including Spymac.com and Itunesdb.com.

In its statement, the managers of Spymac.com said removing the service became necessary. The site's managers had first tried to thwart stream ripping by hiding the IP addresses of shared streams, but that effort was quickly sidestepped by determined programmers.

"Our team has invested significant development time into Spymac Music and the service may return--in some form or another--as soon as a suitable method to prevent piracy can be developed ... or as soon as Apple makes it clear which direction it plans to travel regarding ITunes' built-in streaming capabilities," the Spymac statement said.

The Itunesdb.com site contained a similar statement from Rob Lockstone, the site's owner: "I cannot, in good conscience, continue to provide a service which will facilitate the theft of copyrighted material."

Lockstone denied that the decision to shut down the service is the result of pressure from Apple or the music industry. He did cite concern about the legality of the services as a contributing factor to take Itunesdb.com offline after less than a week.

"There is some discussion that simply providing a centralized location for people to come and access other people's servers violates various Digital Rights Management--or ASCAP or RIAA--provisions, even if the person does not copy the music. I don't know; I'm not a lawyer," he said.

Update Expected

Benesch said he agrees with the decision by Spymac.com to remove the service that he helped to develop.

"These services were a neat idea and they were legitimate," he said. "However, programs have popped up that are illegal and that put the services in a bad light by not using ITunes as it was designed. I see it as a tragedy and have no doubt that next version of ITunes will see the feature changed in some way."

For his part, Benesch hopes Apple modifies the ITunes sharing features so users can continue to share songs legitimately, rather than just removing the song sharing functionality.

Encrypting the stream might be one way to counter the stream ripping programs, he said.

However, that move might just be another move in the game of cat-and-mouse between Apple and those who want to see ITunes used as a file swapping system, according to Benesch.

"There are some pretty creative people out there and I'm amazed with the methods they come up with to evade features. I'm not entirely convinced that even if Apple does encrypt [ITunes streams] that someone won't find a way around it," he said.

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