A current SlashDot posting, Apple Updates, Cripples iTunes shows just how hysterical some people can get when they get an ideological burr under their saddles.
So now the update prevents sharing between iTunes installations that aren’t on the same physical network. Apparently, this is how Apple presented it all along, but there was no technical restriction in the previous release. Of course, people being people, some folks came up with technology to not only listen to iTunes servers across the internet, but to store the data stream locally, something which iTunes never intended to support.
I’m relatively neutral on intellectual property laws: I believe in the general right for people to control their original ideas long enough to make some money off of them, but I think that the corporate abuse of copyright (and patents, etc) has pushed things way out of whack. But in this case, people are just being cranky. There are already lots of technologies for streaming music. Yes, some of them take more work to set up than iTunes, but if it’s that important to you, you’ll do it. Apple doesn’t need to do it for you, especially when they already have to walk a very fine line to keep the iTunes Music Store open until it finishes revolutionizing the retail music business.