People that go to Amazon to get these things like album art (for music they already own) are basically stealing bandwidth from Amazon. While information was meant to be free, a company like Amazon probably pays a steep bill for bandwidth.

Amazon probably left the system wide open in hopes that people would dream up some novel new uses for the data that would also drive sales. But now if Joe Blow uses an application that invisibly gets the good stuff from Amazon, then Amazon is subsidising the application via its datacenter, and also getting no recognition for it (and also no sales to offset it.)

I won't go so far as to say "ha-ha freetards/leeches", but I probably could.

I expect that it won't be long before Amazon cuts all ties to the API in favor of an Amazon-owned and distributed application that will "lock" you into only getting information (ie, books, cover art, etc.) from Amazon if you *BOUGHT* the product at Amazon.

Apple has been excitingly successful with this concept (locking users into iTunes for EVERYTHING), and, if I were Jeff, I'd be wanting to scarf up some of that clout myself.

Shades of Scorpius - maybe we'll see the day that Google's ownership of the Galactic Library will become a GOOD thing!

Looks like this is the reason why I can no longer download album covers in Amarok. I see that the developers are changing over to Last.fm for the newest version, but I'm still on 1.4.9.

Have you used iTunes? Ever? The only 'tie' I see is if you purchase m4p audio content from Apple then you'll need iTunes to play it (if it is DRM'd - otherwise its a snip to convert to MP3). If you don't want that, then don't buy DRM'd content using iTunes.

Granted you can only sync the iPod Touch and iPhone using iTunes, but even then, media can come from anywhere as long as the format is supported.

That said I don't like the idea of the alleged forthcoming tablet being locked down in the same way as the phone, that would turn me right off. Its the wrong way to go - you'd think Apple had learnt the lesson with the iPhone

What lesson? That it is good, that the iPhone is locked down as it is? Because they sold an ungodly amount of iPhones in spite of their policy....

"Tellico had the same key. It was hard-coded in the source."

Rather shoddy coding practices on display there, me old mucker.

"Some other application could have used the same key, since it was pretty much public, though"

What?!?!

I can see this being the driving motive for private keys. Amazon are allowing these (non-profit generating) database queries out of good will, despite these apps clearly being in violation of the T&C (you're not going to purchase a book or album from Amazon, which you're software has just catalogued you as clearly already owning.)

If sloppy security practices are allowing other apps to spoof their identities, then I can easily understand that, at the very least, this would create a nightmare auditing the traffic load on your database.

At worst, I could see this potentially being used in some nefarious fraud technique. I suspect these freebie apps aren't the only ones using the services - I wouldn't be surprised if there are some people paying to use this service too, with some form of per click revenue generation.

And if there aren't, I'll wager Amazon may have plans to.

If you're an administrator, then you'll be wanting to keep close tabs the server load which you're shouldering out of sheer generosity, so it’s of no surprise that they’ve clamped down on security if these open source idiots have been handing out their security keys willy-nilly.

What do you mean "What?!?!" ? It's trivial to use Wireshark (etc) to sniff API calls... this should not be a surprise to you.

The API provided convenient access to data that Amazon already provides public access to, through their HTML interface.

It is a convenience to automated consumers of that data to have it accessible in an API, and likewise I'm sure Amazon would prefer automated access to avoid needing results to be rendered to HTML, at a bandwidth and processing cost to themselves.

Unfortunately, as they've decided to block public access to the API, the only public access is now through the HTML interface. So, we'll go back to accessing it through that, parsing the html returned to scrape the data we need and discarding the rest.

At least one album art downloader has already updated to retrieve Amazon cover art this way.

Nope, the likely problem is that at least some of the cover art and pictures are not licensed for reproduction anywhere besides the amazon website. By allowing apps to pilfer the content unimpeded Amazon puts itself into a position of assisting an infringement or infringing on copyright.