Anontune is a proposal for a "fault-tolerant and open platform for social music" from Anonymous. Its current beta implementation allows users to create playlists of song titles which are then playable through Anontune's music engine. Since the music engine works by searching other networks like YouTube these playlists can then be shared without sharing any actual music. Thus Anontune's music engine is more like a client-side metasearch engine than any previous systems. Anonymous hopes that this will make the platform immune from copyright infringement lawsuits by never directly hosting or linking to copyrighted music or allowing it to be downloaded.
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Aims
In a white paper titled "A Fault-tolerant and Open Platform for Social Music (Version 2)" Anonymous outline their aims for the Anontune project:anontune is closed
The concept of openness here is a pervading theme for Anontune. The source code for Anontune is open source under the AGPL license, there are no current restrictions on developer API usage, the platform may be used by anyone, and the music itself will be open. Anonymous view this as a key difference from other music services stating that [such services] employ geographic restrictions and provide only partial music catalogs.
Stance on piracy
A video posted on the website stated that Anontune will never host or encourage the downloading of copyrighted music but will instead provide information about music. The video states that this is a new paradigm for music sharing, and will allow the music which exists on the Internet to be played from a single platform. The video also states that Anontune itself, as distinguished from copyright questions about the music, will be legal. Users of the service will be able to remain largely anonymous.
Technology
Anontune's music engine works by consulting multiple components called "routes." Each route describes a way to search, filter, play, and optionally download - music from a specific place on the Internet. A route for YouTube would allow results from YouTube to be played in a web browser. The music engine is designed to be as flexible as possible and its finished version will allow users to extend it by adding arbitrary routes thereby increasing the music they have access to.
Because of limitations in the web Anonymous claim they had to develop new technology allowing sockets to be used from the music engine. This technology will require contributors to run a Java applet. Such technology is currently in development, but already functional.
News reports warned potential users that they would need to trust Anonymous to use the service, because the website would require the Java applet to run with full permissions. Anonymous responded in a Pastebin post that the Java applet is no longer used, that any Java used would be open source, that it wouldn't be strictly required, and that it would be against their interests to harm their users.
A prototype went online in the early hours of April 21.
Legal issues
Anonymous says that the law is on their side in the creation of Anontune, and that one object of Anontune is to break down the copyright industry's monopoly without fighting them in court. They say that they have learned from the experiences of previous entities such as Napster and LimeWire. Anontune will attempt to avoid legal problems by never hosting links to copyrighted content. Users will be able to avoid lawsuits as well, since the media is played in the browser rather than downloaded to a user's hard drive. Since Anontune merely allows users to centralize their experience of other music sources, legal complaints would have to be addressed to the original sources of the content such as YouTube.