New Tool Cracks Apple's FairPlay DRM

goombah99 writes "PlayFair is an integrated utility that removes the DRM from AAC music files protected by Apple's FairPlay encryption. Information is limited, but the source code is on SourceForge.net and it appears to actually remove the encryption itself and not simply hijack the QuickTime audio stream as earlier methods did. The cracking operation can only be done on songs the user has already has valid licenses for and requires either an iPod or a windows computer for key recovery. If you choose to redistribute these songs you will be violating the contract you bought them under: better hope they aren't watermarked or you might end up paying for releasing one in the wild. To me the authors are vandals not revolutionaries, and may have ensured WMA becomes the standard."

Comments

Incorrect background on VeriDisc/FairPlay

[ikewillis]

When Apple opened the iTunes Music Store, they licensed a technology called "FairPlay" from a company called "Veridisc".

Apple bought VeriDisc. They didn't license FairPlay; they own it.

fairplay CVS is still up

[dj_paulgibbs]

Although Sourceforge have pulled the .tar.gz mirror, you can still login into the CVS and get it:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ playfair login
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ playfair checkout playfair

Re:Lies

[ncc74656]

So I suppose that you think that just because you purchased a copy of a book you're entiteld to do whatever you want with the contents? Up to and including violating copyright laws?

Quit yer trolling...who said anything about violating copyright laws? If I'm working on my car and want to refer to some pages out of the shop manual, I'll make a copy of the relevant pages and work from those so the manual doesn't get dirtied up. That is fair use. Another example of fair use is dubbing a CD to tape so I can play it in my car (which doesn't have a CD player). That's also fair use. How, then, is stripping the DRM off an .m4p so I can convert it to Ogg Vorbis for playback on my Palm (an example of format-shifting analogous to the aforementioned CD-to-tape dub) not fair use? It's only copyright infringement if I turn around and put the resulting .m4a files up on $P2P_NETWORK or otherwise distribute them to others.

Beware, downloaded songs are watermarked

[smadnessness]

Songs bought and downloaded from iTMS are watermarked with your account information. Checking out the source for the song with a simple text editor I was able to clearly see my name and email address used for purchasing from the store. I don't know yet if these are stripped when playfair strips DRM, but it's worth verifying before you start playing pirate again.

Besides, CD quality is still better audio.

Re:Lies

[Sparks23]

Not to further fuel the flames, but it's not quite that straightforward.

I think part of the problem is that folks are looking at AAC as 'Apple's format.' It's not. AAC -- Advanced Audio Coding -- is an open standard; there's an ISO number for it, and it was come up with by the MPEG standards group. AAC is to MPEG4 what MP3 (MPEG1 Audio Layer 3) was to the original MPEG. AAC itself is quite widely played by software players -- more than just iTunes -- and is more or less the intended successor to MP3. (NOTE: Intended. I make no predictions about whether or not it will actually happen.)

Where you can point the finger at Apple is on their DRM implementation on top of AAC; that's not part of the AAC specification, and so means that while an un-protected AAC file can play on iTunes, WinAmp, etc., a protected iTunes Music Store one cannot. THIS is a little unfortunate; I'd love to be able to load protected AAC onto my NetMD minidisc player without having to burn it to CD first.

WMA makes me more nervous as a format, because as far as I know it's controlled by a single entity (Microsoft) instead of an open group (MPEG standards group). However, it can't be discounted that WMA's integration of DRM has made it the more attractive commercial option for folks, since it's possible to make differing players handle the same DRM-protected files.

Whether or not AAC with some form of DRM will catch on remains to be seen, I guess.

Re:Lies

[plj]

For the n^th time, WMP for OS X does not support WMA's DRM scheme. Or, to be a bit more specific, it only supports it's first version, which never became generally used and is now practically obsolete.

Every online music store out there uses version 2 of WMA's DRM.