Wednesday, November 26, 2003
So much for Itunes DRM
Sometime last month, I had made a post on the trouble with Itunes's DRM. In that post, I had made the offhand prediction that the DRM would be cracked sooner rather than later. A month on, CNET is reporting that the ITunes DRM has been cracked by Jon Johansen, of DeCSS fame. Seems like Johansen's software works by latchng on to the ITunes stream before DRM locks in.
Johansen's program works by patching Apple's QuickTime software with a new software component of his own. Because he called the program a "memory dumper," programmers on message boards around the Web speculated that QTFairUse made a copy of the raw, unprotected song data from the computer's temporary memory after it was unprotected for playback, rather than simply recording the audio stream as it played. But this was not independently verified by Apple or Johansen.
The software, which is downloadable from here, works only with ITunes for Windows and songs legally bought from ITunes. And it sure as hell isn't easy to use.
Johansen's software isn't for technology novices. In its current form, it requires several complicated steps to create a working program from source code, and it doesn't create a working song file that can be immediately or simply played from a digital music program like Winamp or Microsoft's Windows Media Player. But if other developers--or Johansen himself--pursue the project, it could herald the arrival of simple ripping programs that could create unprotected music files from iTunes songs as simply as from an ordinary compact disc.
Wonder how Apple will react. Update Quick Time or realise the stupidity of what they have done in their zeal to sell Ipod's by using a trick straight out of Microsoft's playbook?
Johansen's program works by patching Apple's QuickTime software with a new software component of his own. Because he called the program a "memory dumper," programmers on message boards around the Web speculated that QTFairUse made a copy of the raw, unprotected song data from the computer's temporary memory after it was unprotected for playback, rather than simply recording the audio stream as it played. But this was not independently verified by Apple or Johansen.
The software, which is downloadable from here, works only with ITunes for Windows and songs legally bought from ITunes. And it sure as hell isn't easy to use.
Johansen's software isn't for technology novices. In its current form, it requires several complicated steps to create a working program from source code, and it doesn't create a working song file that can be immediately or simply played from a digital music program like Winamp or Microsoft's Windows Media Player. But if other developers--or Johansen himself--pursue the project, it could herald the arrival of simple ripping programs that could create unprotected music files from iTunes songs as simply as from an ordinary compact disc.
Wonder how Apple will react. Update Quick Time or realise the stupidity of what they have done in their zeal to sell Ipod's by using a trick straight out of Microsoft's playbook?
