Siu Lun

Direct from the site:

“Songbird™ is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. Like Winamp, it supports extensions and skins feathers. Like Firefox®, it is built from Mozilla®, cross-platform and open source.”

Go onto their site and see their demo, it looks quite good. Very handy for the end user to grab songs on all kinds of sites and play them on your own computer and even record it for your own use.

BUT

What is the legal implications for this. As a concerned web designer, Songbird seems to unrestrictively download all songs that it files from a page in order to “stream” it to the end user straight away. This means a huge server and bandwidth load for the person/site concerned and as a site owner myself, I do not approve of automated downloading and I feel Songbird is treading in dangerous grounds. In this day and age, where even google was sued for caching contents of sites, it is not a good idea.

Maybe I got it wrong, but that’s what it seems like from their screencast anyway. I guess those who want to protect their content on the site would place it behind a php link and link to a directory that cannot be easily guessed.. i.e. using anti-hotlinking.

Anyhow, I admit I did not even try the software, but this is a first impression critic. If it proves true, then it is a critic of them in general, if it isn’t true then it is a critic of the information they’ve conveyed to me.