[Playlist] How to avoid music download?

[Chris Anderson]

On 9/25/07, Lucas Gonze <lgonze at panix.com> wrote:
>
> People talk about this aspect of XSPF all the time, we should be good
> hosts for this technical discussion like any other.
>

Perhaps the best place to steer this discussion is to make clear that
the locations xspf references are URIs like any other, so all access
control can be thought of as though the url is provided as a link on a
standard html web page.

So session based authentication will work to control who can access
the file, but there is nothing one can do to control what users do
with the file once they have access to it. (They could even repost it
somewhere else or email it to friends.)

But I think the point to be clearest on is that there is nothing
special about the way audio files are referenced from xspf, so people
who are familiar with normal webpages will realize that they already
understand xspf in that regard.

People interested in obsfucating URLs might enjoy hypemachine's
quasi-XSPF: http://hypem.com/playlist/time/today/xml/1/list.xspf

used by this player:
http://hypem.com/flash/time/today/xml/1/0/today.html

They seem intent on thwarting the efforts of sites like Grabb.it to
link to their files (for understandable bandwidth-related reasons),
and provide the locations in some encrypted form that it decoded by
their proprietary flash player. In this case, one can still easily
find the original urls by watching the network activity of the flash
player (but automated gathering of urls is harder.)

The take home lesson is that information tends to free itself.

-- 
Chris Anderson
http://jchris.mfdz.com