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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."
Since this is Apple its wrong.
If it was Microsoft or some other company ITMS users would flaming it up and laughing at how bad they suck.
If you don't like the terms of use, don't buy it. Simple enough - that applies to all consumer goods, not "all consumer goods except those favoured by the /. crowd".
Tell me again why this is an issue? If the major artists & labels use DRM, you have three options:
1. buy their music & put up with the DRM
2. don't, & spend your money on independant artists and labels instead.
3. buy no music
But no, many of your are clamouring that your preferences should override the property rights of the content owners, & any contract you enter with them.
Those calling for restrictions on contractual terms of use are pirates in the worst sense - you're not violating copyright (which in itself isn't theft, mind you), you're violating human rights.
I own my hard drive. I don't have a license to use it. Whatever is on there is mine to do with as I choose.
> It's affected sales to me. I stopped buying cd's when napster first
> came out, and haven't since.
Just the opposite with me. I don't buy many CDs, but then I don't run gtk-gnutella much either. But I have bought CDs because of it, a good example was just this weekend. You see, I live deep in flyover country where you don't hear much on the radio except what Clear Channel is pushing. So from time to time I 'graze' new stuff on P2P and Shoutcast. Had heard of Moby from time to time but except for one track I caught on VH1 once, didn't know squat. So last year I typed "Moby" into gtk-gnutella and grabbed some mp3 and even a couple of mpegs. The music kinda grew on me so while I was in a Best Buy (90 miles from home, in semi-civilization) I bought two CDs. Because while MP3 is ok, the real CD is the only thing I want to be playing on the main amp in the living room when I'm cranking it up.
Democrat delenda est
AAC is not proprietary. It is an open standard. iTunes and the iPod aren't the only players that can play AAC - any number of MPEG4 compatible players can play it (e.g. VLC, MPlayer, WinAmp with a plugin, etc.) Just because Apple happens to be the one major hardware vendor that has MP3 players capable of playing AAC doesn't make it any less of a standard. Heck, by those standards, Ogg is a proprietary format, since it's only played by what, two or three players that are out there instead of every music-playing device under the sun? Now, it does have licensing issues, but then again so does MP3.
This is waaaay different from the X-Box executable format - a truly proprietary format that truly only one vendor uses. I don't see Microsoft offering to open up the X-Box executable file formats for a fee any time soon...
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
I own about 25 CDs, plus another 30 iTunes albums that I previously would have never bought had I not been able to hear them first.
I wouldn't even know how to spell scratch if a buddy hadn't downloaded this guy named Rob Swift a while back. Now I own 2 of his albums and 2 albums of a band (Xecutioners) he's a member of. That's not even counting Qbert and a bunch of other guys in that genre I own CDs of. In fact, that's a whole genre I probably would never have heard of, nor bought CDs of, were it not for Kazaa.
Actually now that I think about it, I wouldn't own 6 Snoop CDs or a host of other rap CDs were it not for Kazaa.
Allow me a Snoop-ism for RIAA: "eat a dick".
.sigs are for post^Hers.
The /. community applauds when somebody cracks a DRM scheme, whines when individuals get sued, cries foul play when an ISP is asked for download records, and sneers at suggestions that the music industry is losing money to P2P.
/. plan for preventing 13-year-olds from stealing all their music from other 13-year-olds? Or should we just file this away as trivialities that won't matter when the grand socialist order sweeps away capitalist greed?
What exactly is the
Would everyone here be complaining if it were WMA that was cracked?
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"