[Feedback] Magnatune song theft vulnerability

[Nikolaj Hald Nielsen]

> While looking through the features of Amarok and came across Magnatune, I
> noticed that Amarok shows direct links to the songs. With that, any Linux
> user can use Wget or a command similar to that to take the file. I'm pretty
> sure that the artists that have music in the magnatune store don't want
> thier work stolen. >.<   So, this should probably be fixed.


No, quite to the contrary, Magnatune explicitly allows you to do this,
if it is what you really want. In essence, it is no different than
going to, say http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/hawkshaw-ice/,
downloading one of the playlsit files from there, and wget'ing the mp3
listed therein.

Magnatune releases all the music under a Creative Commons license that
allows for free non commercial use. However, the files you can get
this way are ( relatively as 128kbs mp3 is really not that bad for
streaming ) low quality files with a small spoken nag message at the
end ( and yes, you can quite easily use an audio editor to remove this
if you _really_ want to ).

What Magnatune and their artists makes money from, is making it easy
to listen to their content as much as you would like, and hoping that,
as you know that anything you pay for a download of the album ( which
you get in much better or even lossless quality ) is split 50/50 with
the artist, people are willing to support them. And it is working
remarkably well.

At this point, I should properly mention that I work as independent
software developer hired by Magnatune! :-)

- Nikolaj