Kyle
The RIAA and the hacktivist group Anonymous has been at odds for a while. Anonymous and coherts LulzSec went after most of the major record labels in 2011 getting usernames, email addresses and more and doing data dumps all over the place.
The new service called Anontune is still in the early stages of development. The system is designed to pull songs from third party sites like Youtube and then users can put them into their own playlists and share them. They plan to do all of this and all the while keep the service from getting shut down by the music industry, reports wired.
“We would say stuff like, ‘People really use YouTube as a music player yet it really sucks for that purpose … it’s too unorganized,’” the anon wrote to Wired. “And then, ‘YouTube does make a good music player but you can’t play all your songs on it since the obscure ones aren’t uploaded,’ then eventually, ‘Hmmm, what if you were to combine music websites like Myspace, Yahoo, YouTube and others?’”
More with video after the break
Anonymous plans to scrub all the possible sources of the internet that they can, and then use their own interface that lets users create playlists without having to grab one song from one site and another song from another, and googling in between.The new system was created when an anonymous member posted his prototype idea back in December. A group of Anonymous members has been working on it since.
Anonymous’ latest tussle with the music industry was when Megaupload got shut down and moments later the hacktivist group had taken to the internet and shut down the websites of the RIAA and the DOJ.
“What we’re seeing here is a situation where the government is getting much more involved in enforcement, and we know that the U.S. government doesn’t like Anonymous all that much anyway,” Electronic Freedom Foundation Attorney Corryne McSherry said in an interview with Wired. Other music services can attempt to cut deals with music labels to avoid legal hot water, but that’s not really an option here.
“I think content owners, if they feel like the site is a really viable site, they’re going to be pretty nervous [about this],” McSherry said. “Because they like to have people that they can make deals with, and there’s no one to make a deal with in this situation.”
It’s hard to tell if the world can handle another music service, but with the guys behind Anonymous in control many may feel that their system is liberating. Wired does warn that the system uses a java applet that accesses you’re music and you may not want to let Anonymous have that control over your device. However, Anonymous has always been about hacktivism and for some reason I for one don’t think they would mess with their own users. Especially those who use the Anontune system because they’re fed up with the RIAA.
Anonymous says their new Anontune platform will not allow downloading of copywritten music but be more like a search engine or a torrent tracker. You can take a peek at their (crude) prototype here at anontune.com
Source: Wired
