Everybody seems to be up in arms lately over the sudden realization that streaming music from iTunes can be used to - gasp! - possibly pirate music! Oh my goodness! The sky is falling!

One of the few writers injecting a voice of reason into the hysteria is David Zeiler, who writes for sunspot.net:

Streaming, it should be noted, is distinct from downloading. When you stream a file, it's like listening to the radio; no file is transferred to your hard drive. Many Mac users doing this believed that since they were just listening and not downloading, the activity was legal. Before anyone could start debating the legality of streaming, however, other clever hackers devised a way to use the sharing function to download songs from one another's drives. Suddenly, Apple was an unwittingly accomplice to illegal file-sharing, the very vice its Music Store had been created to discourage. Yet the news has not generated the level of distress from the recording industry one would expect, though it clearly is concerned.

David lists main of the same points I've listed here on Blogcritics in response to hysterical screeds. It is worth noting that streaming was added to iTunes 4 as a new feature. It isn't that someone found out how to exploit the software, streaming was added in this version exactly so people could share their music. Sure, maybe saving those streams wasn't expected, but it's hardly the end of the world. The fancy new AAC-encoded files from the iTunes Music Store cannot be shared, after all. In fact, iTunes users have to specifically enable sharing, and it is limited to very few simultaneous users, so nothing is happening here that couldn't just as easily happen via email.

Mr. Zeiler also looks at what this capability might mean for the future Windows version of iTunes, due by the end of the year. It seems clear that given the different user bases, the labels are going to suspect much more piracy from Windows users, and are therefore going to expect even more strict requirements than those already imposed on the Mac.