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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."
1) My computer, my data, my choice. DRM snake oil providers can deal with it. The future won't tolerate the crap these copywrite perverters are trying to enforce, may as well wake up now before it's too late.
2) Downloading music does not affect sales. DRM is only there to appease the record industry, still scared shitless that artists can have direct contact with their fans who still provide them with income. This cuts them out as the middleman. Like the landlord of times before us, they will be replaced or burnt to the ground. Again, deal with it.
3) The previous two paragraphs are both 'revolutionary' premises. Vandals these coders are not.
Wouldn't it be wonderfull once the WMA standard becomes available everywhere? All online music stores will use it because it will be so secure. On-demand video companies will spring up from this new found industry standard. Portable players and home stereo systems will all support it. Every media file on your computer will fall under one standard.
And then a code monky from Argentina will be codeing at 3am and have a Mountain Dew inspired breakthrough, and WMA will be broken wide open forever.
Software companies continue to forget the days of dongles, code wheeles, and manual page/paragraph/word lookups. All it will do is annoy real consumers.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
The problem with incredibly clever people is inevitably they come up with something you don't want. Who's to say they weren't WMA or even (shudder) RIAA proponents, bent on showing the public can't be trusted and DMCA is the right approach?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I already have a removal tool for WMA. Just waiting for it to become a standard. ;)
To me the authors are vandals not revolutionaries, and may have ensured WMA becomes the standard.
If DRM is offensive to you, than FairPlay is no better than WMA.
If you don't particularly mind DRM, then what's your complaint about WMA? I think it is the iTunes contract you like, and not FairPlay itself.
It's a good thing.
Contrary to the knee-jerk reaction (and incidentally, also contrary to the blurb), I think that this tool is a blessing. Since it only works on songs that you have a valid license for (ie stuff you bought), it removes the burn-to-cd step from the "buy from ITMS, burn to CD, re-rip to MP3" process for those of us who don't have an iPod. I've bought quite a bit of music from the store, and I relish the opportunity to use it on my Lyra. This, I think, was the developers' intention with this tool-- not infringement. This is the only use I will have for this tool. Others may use it improperly or illegally, but that does not mean I should be denied access to the tool.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
Apple bought VeriDisc. They didn't license FairPlay; they own it.
Having this available is like a selling point for ITMS. I've been rather resistant about buying songs there because they place restrictions about what I can do with my own data on my own machine. (and no, I'm not talking about selling them).
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Maybe they wanted to play their paid for tunes on something other then iTunes or an iPod.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Well, what are we waiting for? Let's diff two cracked AAC's of the same iTune bought by different people to see if there's any encoding!
But is that a bad thing?
What if sales of music in this format increase, because people are more likely to buy songs they can use as they please instead of buying songs that have annoying DRM restrictions on them?
The bad assumption here is that by removing DRM, people won't want to buy a product, because they'll just copy it instead of paying for it. The problem with that assumption is it ignores the fact that copying itself has a cost, even if it's not a financial one: You both have to have a copy of what you want to make a copy of, and you then have to actually distribute that copy to whoever actually wants it.
Or you could just go to a central store of digital copies, pay your paltry 99 cents, and get your own copy. For most people, 99 cents is worth the convenience of having whatever they want on demand.
Before you start thinking this won't work, look at DVD sales nowadays. VHS tapes were priced to cost many, many times more than the price of a rental. Rentals were attractive. DVD's are priced at about $20-$30 each. Result? Even though people could fairly easy copy DVDs if they REALLY wanted to, it's just "easier" to walk into Best Buy and plop down the $20 - so much so that many many more people buy DVD's than used to buy VHS tapes.
For most people, trying to find and download a copy of something off the internet just isn't worth the $20 to buy the copy at Best Buy, or the $20/month to have Netflix mail it to you.
Very little of the cost/value of content is the content itself - most of it is the distribution. Efficient distribution can distribute content at prices low enough to be competitive with comparatively inefficient illegal distribution while still creating enough revenue to pay content providers.
paintball
Honestly, this is borderline, but I can understand the logic behind it. What happens if it turns out the trolls are right, Apple does die, and you need new hardware? Or play your AACs under Linux? Or any number of other scenarios that could call for legitimate fair use?
Here's the thing you and many others are missing - PlayFair only strips the DRM if you already own a legal copy. If you read so much as the single paragraph summary on their site, you'd see that in order crack the DRM, PlayFair extracts your key from either your iPod or your iTunes software. So if you don't already have legal access to the music, you're not going to be able to strip the DRM.
Yes, it can be used as a piracy tool, but really the argument for this isn't really any different than the one for DeCSS. This can be, and very much is, a tool for fair use.
These guys didn't do anything special. The libraries they used have been out and available in a simple command-line form for quite awhile. They apparently just made it more accessible to the public. The libs are available at http://www.audiocoding.com/. I've played with the command-line version before and it works fine.
So it's been cracked. Does this affect the massive quantity of illegal MP-3's out there in the least? No. If you needed a copy of a song that was on iTMS, you could always find it elsewhere if you weren't worried about copyrights.
I use iTMS because of:
- Download speed
- Gauranteed Results
- Gauranteed Quality
- Ease of use
The DRM affects me not in the least. I have no reason to crack what I've bought from iTMS, and won't do so."Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Although Sourceforge have pulled the .tar.gz mirror, you can still login into the CVS and get it:
/ playfair login
/ playfair checkout playfair
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot
Maybe the guy who did this project is like me. He needed to something with AAC that "FairPlay" wasn't allowing him to do, so he found a way around it. Or maybe he was just being a geek and wanted to see if it could be done.
This only works if you already have a key, so you aren't stealing anything, it just makes it possible to get better use out of music you paid for. Such as putting it on your slimserver etc. I don't think that the availability of such a tool is going to cause people to go hunting for protected aac files to crack, and if you are going share them, you could just rip them as mp3 (yes i know lesser quality yada yada). I think this tool is useful for people that do buy iTunes an i for one will probably buy more now that i can get better use out of them.
Think of it as the same thing as cracking a game you already bought so that you don't have to put the CD in the drive every time you want to play it.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
(from dictionary.com)
Vandal (van'dl)
1. vandal One who willfully or maliciously defaces or destroys public or private property.
2. A member of a Germanic people that overran Gaul, Spain, and northern Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. and sacked Rome in 455.
As these people obviously have not maliciously defaced or destroyed public or private property, I can only assume, then, that the repeated references to them as "vandals" means that the FBI has identified the coders as coming from an obscure Germanic sect, whose culture was believed lost.
Which leads to a conundrum. If we don't arrest these people, then we are validating the viewpoint that the DMCA is far overreaching. If we do arrest these people, then we are destroying the remnants of a lost civilization important to our shared cultural heritage.
Declare a law overly broad, or destroy a valuable culture? What is Ashcroft to do?
The ______ Agenda
What if the next version of WMA encryption were as secure as AES? It's certainly not likely, but I wouldn't say it's impossible either. I understand that there are fundamental differences between DRM and plain encryption, but the point is that uncrackable systems are possible.
This is nonsense. Encryption systems may be practically uncrackable. Encryption systems that have to decrypt the "protected" contents for you so that you can listen to them will never be in the least bit secure. If you can hear it you can record it. There is no getting around this. The entire idea of DRM is, on the face of it, futile.
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.
==========
support the arts!
www.smadness.com
To me the authors are vandals not revolutionaries, and may have ensured WMA becomes the standard.
Vandals? Really? Wow, because the first thing that came to my mind is: wow, I can unencrypt MY files and put them on my MythTV box, or trascode them to use in my cars mp3 player or send them through my Slimplayer. People are getting a little weird about DRM. Vandals is probably the most ridiculous thing I've hear yet. Itunes is great, but if we are going to continue to have fair use we are going to have to stop buying in to all the hype and realize that using a product we bought isn't criminal. I'm a fucking consumer, not a pirate.
Quack, quack.
Your first three paragraphs are quite true, but have no bearing at all on what I was saying. I was saying that the claim those companies make that 'It is just the same as stealing from a shop' (actual quote) is false.
It does not matter what kind of contract they have with the musicians, nor if they are owners, nor if I or anyone else agreed to the licence. The *statement* is false. If I go to a shop, see some vase, let's say, and I copy that vase at home, can the shop or the owner accuse me of stealing his vase? No. (at least not icn the jurisdiction I live). I *could* be breaking copyright or some patents, yes, but I would not be charged with stealing it from the shop.
The RIAA claims one could, if one does exactly the same, but instead of a vase, with one of their CDs. THAT is what is absurd, and what I was arguing.
The problem with your line of reasoning, is that it starts from the established point of copyrights that we have developped into today, and do not try to see outside the framework that is now almost considered a natural right. but it isn't, and, in fact, it never was. It's very clear (whatever the Supreme Court says about it) that the founding fathers meant it to be a right of limited scope and duration, to *stimulate* new and innovative works, and then bring it to the public good.
This, clearly, has been perverted and corrupted in a system that has virtual no limitations anymore, and which main goal is the squeeze as much money and profit out of it by and for the middle-man; corporations that have huge profits but hardly create anything innovative themselves, and, in fact, try their best to stiffle innovation when they feel threatened.
You think 'asking to reform' will do actually amount to anything, since it would mean they practically vanish from the scene? Me thinks not. I think the chance of that happening is as big as it was if the serfs would have 'asked' the aristocracy if they would please give up their powerbase.
This line of reasoning shows an apparent lack of sense for reality.
Unjust laws are most often overruled by breaking them en masse, and what's more, I do not think that that is an immoral act on itself, on the contrary. Far from me to entice anyone in doing something illegal, but I still can say what I think (unless Free speech has been abolished too?), and I think that the law, as it was original conceived and intended was just, but what it is and has become today is unjust and immoral, and should not be used to make ppl guilty, let alone criminalised, when they are disregarding those perverted laws.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---