While iTunes version 4 was a huge step ahead in terms of publicity for Apple because everybody was talking about their new Music Store, another feature was even more important: the software provided the ability to share software via the Internet (which was a good idea).

But as the files were more or less served „as is“ it was actually more the coming of a new Napster and new tools were emerging making use of its protocol. Apple reacted with a pretty embarrassing move and limited the reachability of it‘s sharing service to the local network.

However, the cat is out of the bag. First, there is a hack called 401ok circumventing this mechanism in iTunes 4.0.1. And – even more interesting – there is free implementation of the sharing protocol used (DAAP). Let‘s see how this develops. At least this thing shows you can‘t take back anything you have put on the Web once.