How to kill off a good free service

I have been a huge fan of Pandora since Kevin first called our attention to it.  Pandora is based on the Music Genome Project and simply put will find and stream music based on songs and artists that you tell it you like.  It is extremely accurate in determining what songs you will like based on that information, I can’t remember ever hearing a song on Pandora that I didn’t like.  It is really that good.  In order for Pandora to provide the free service we enjoy it has to have some Javascript code that prevents the music from being recorded, otherwise the music industry would be all over them and we would not be able to enjoy the service the good Pandora folks provide.

Stuff Magazine is reporting that some nefarious hacker has written a Firefox plug-in that will strip away the copy protections that prevent users from saving the songs locally and it even accesses the CDDB to fill in artist and album information.  This is totally illegal and runs a real risk of forcing Pandora to either start charging users for the service or shutting it down completely to avoid legal difficulties.  There is always one person willing to ruin it for everyone and no, I will not publish a link to it.

-jk

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