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We have two followups this morning to Tuesday's story on Steve Jobs's call to do away with DRM for music. The first is an editorial in The Economist sent in by reader redelm, who notes that as "arguably the world's leading business newspaper/magazine" that publication is in a position to influence legal and political decision-makers who may never have heard of DRM. The Economist says: "Mr Jobs's argument, in short, is transparently self-serving. It also happens to be right." Next, Whiney Mac Fanboy sends pointers to two blog entries by "DVD Jon" Johansen. In the first Johansen questions Jobs's misuse of statistics in attempting to prove that consumers aren't tied to iPods through ITMS: "Many iPod owners have never bought anything from the iTunes Store. Some have bought hundreds of songs. Some have bought thousands. At the 2004 Macworld Expo, Steve revealed that one customer had bought $29,500 worth of music." Johansen's second post questions Jobs's "DRM-free in a heartbeat" claim: "There are... many Indie artists who would love to sell DRM-free music on iTunes, but Apple will not allow them... It should not take Apple's iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay when the content owner does not mandate DRM. This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users."
Update: 02/08 16:28 GMT by KD : Added missing links.

We have two followups this morning to Tuesday's story on Steve Jobs's call to do away with DRM for music. The first is an editorial in The Economist sent in by reader redelm, who notes that as "arguably the world's leading business newspaper/magazine" that publication is in a position to influence legal and political decision-makers who may never have heard of DRM. The Economist says: "Mr Jobs's argument, in short, is transparently self-serving. It also happens to be right." Next, Whiney Mac Fanboy sends pointers to two blog entries by "DVD Jon" Johansen. In the first Johansen questions Jobs's misuse of statistics in attempting to prove that consumers aren't tied to iPods through ITMS: "Many iPod owners have never bought anything from the iTunes Store. Some have bought hundreds of songs. Some have bought thousands. At the 2004 Macworld Expo, Steve revealed that one customer had bought $29,500 worth of music." Johansen's second post questions Jobs's "DRM-free in a heartbeat" claim: "There are... many Indie artists who would love to sell DRM-free music on iTunes, but Apple will not allow them... It should not take Apple's iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay when the content owner does not mandate DRM. This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users."
Update: 02/08 16:28 GMT by KD : Added missing links.

NubKnacker writes "Here we go again. The Register has the story about the encryption in Windows Media Player being hacked by DVD Jon. From the article: 'Jon Lech Johansen has reverse engineered a proprietary algorithm, which is used to wrap Media Player NSC files and ostensibly protect them from hackers sniffing for the media's source IP address, port or stream format. He has also made a decoder available." This has been pending for some time now. Do you see a reason to install Windows/WMP just to be able to view a webcast?"

WillemdeMoor writes "Yahoo News runs a story on Jon Johansen, aka DVD Jon, cracking Google's in-browser video player. Addict3d.org has some more details, including links to Johansen's patch (Win32 executable) and Jon's blog entry at nanocrew.net."

WillemdeMoor writes "Yahoo News runs a story on Jon Johansen, aka DVD Jon, cracking Google's in-browser video player. Addict3d.org has some more details, including links to Johansen's patch (Win32 executable) and Jon's blog entry at nanocrew.net."

ikewillis writes "Remember earlier today when Apple released an update supposedly blocking the hole in iTMS recently discovered by Jon Johansen? News.com reports that he has already worked around the update, and iTMS can now be accessed from non-Windows/MacOS X systems using the new version of his PyMusique software. You can view his blog entry on the issue (ironically titled So Sue Me). More power to you, Jon!"

ikewillis writes "Remember earlier today when Apple released an update supposedly blocking the hole in iTMS recently discovered by Jon Johansen? News.com reports that he has already worked around the update, and iTMS can now be accessed from non-Windows/MacOS X systems using the new version of his PyMusique software. You can view his blog entry on the issue (ironically titled So Sue Me). More power to you, Jon!"

julie-h writes "DVD Jon has done it again. This time it wasn't Apple the target, but Microsoft's WMV9 video format. There is as always a working Proof of Concept program with screenshots."

julie-h writes "DVD Jon has done it again. This time it wasn't Apple the target, but Microsoft's WMV9 video format. There is as always a working Proof of Concept program with screenshots."

julie-h writes "DVD Jon has done it again. This time it wasn't Apple the target, but Microsoft's WMV9 video format. There is as always a working Proof of Concept program with screenshots."

julie-h writes "DVD Jon has done it again. This time it wasn't Apple the target, but Microsoft's WMV9 video format. There is as always a working Proof of Concept program with screenshots."

womby writes "DVD Jon has just announced that he cracked the encryption in Apple's AirPort Express. 'I've released JustePort, a tool which lets you stream MPEG4 Apple Lossless files to your AirPort Express. The stream is encrypted with AES and the AES key is encrypted with RSA.' No real details of the process employed in cracking the unit but newsworthy none the less."

womby writes "DVD Jon has just announced that he cracked the encryption in Apple's AirPort Express. 'I've released JustePort, a tool which lets you stream MPEG4 Apple Lossless files to your AirPort Express. The stream is encrypted with AES and the AES key is encrypted with RSA.' No real details of the process employed in cracking the unit but newsworthy none the less."

An anonymous reader writes "Jon Lech Johansen, who reverse engineered FairPlay back in January, and wrote the decryption code that was later used by an anonymous developer to create the playfair utility, has released a similar utility: DeDRMS. It's only 230 lines. T-shirts anyone?"

joekra writes "The author of DeCSS is back in the spotlight with a new application called QTFairUse. The new application attempts to convert DRM'd AACs to non-DRM'd AACs on Windows machines. MacRumors has done some limited testing on it and has found it doesn't yet work as advertised... but they do offer a look into how it works."