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iTunes 4.6, DRM, and Hymn
fluffy writes "Although the recent iTunes 4.6 upgrade refuses to play music decrypted with Hymn, there's already a trivially-simple workaround, demonstrated within hours of the iTunes release, which still preserves the 'fair use' intent of the tool. What move will Apple take against Hymn next?"
And what happens at the next update? And the one after that?
If you don't like the DRM, buy a version without it. Or whine about the cat & mouse game you're going to keep playing.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
except that groups like the riaa on riding apple's rear to ensure music stays, in their view, "secure"
if apple didnt fix flaws, the riaa would pull the rug out and effectively close iTMS and kill the iPod. does apple want that? how would iTMS users react?
apple's just doing what it needs to remain in business, and honestly - at least apple had the guts to tell the riaa (in a direct manner) why their past ventures werent working, and what they could do to fix it. IMO, their "DRM" is the most relaxed out there anyway, especially with the a huge hole still open (in the form of burning a file to CD, the rip it back to mp3)
They're sellout DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs...
How, exactly?
It's not like they're being dishonest about this. Jobs & Apple have been totally up front about the DRM in iTunes. You simply can't ask for more than honesty.
their appropriation of the work of Open Source programmers notwithstanding.
You say that as if what Apple did wasn't wholly in keeping with the Open Source philosiphy--and, arguably, compatable with the Free Software philosiphy.
While I probably will get around to using this hack to un-DRM some of my songs for totally legit fair use reasons, I have to agree with the Mac-fanboi groupthink that Apple is being pretty cool about the whole DRM thing. I think it's extremely obvious that they're doing their damnedest to satisfy the lawyers at the RIAA while still playing fair with their users.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
So why would one need specialized tools to "break" the encryption?
Or is there some compatibility issue I'm not understanding?
You must have not read the license on the original X11 server not requiring this. If the authors didn't want to allow this, they would have GPL'ed it. They didn't and hence they expect this kind of use.
Some people are really altruistic you know. Obviously you are not.
Give props to Apple for applying the minimum amount of security necessary to do the business they do.
The people at Hymn would make it seem as though their application is rocket-science or something when really it's a tinker tool.
The iTunes DRM is easily bypassed: just open the file in a compatible editor (Bias Peak is nice) -> Save As MP3 / Ogg or whatever your flavor of the month happens to be.
While iTunes doesn't "natively" support OGG out of the box, it's a simple update, and they even throw in a free icon for you already in the iTunes package.
In my opinion they couldn't be more free and liberal with their version of DRM.
If you're half as beautiful naked, you'd be 4 times as beautiful with twice as many clothes on.
Location of iTunes library file not changeable (and in users' homedir). WTF?
Symlinks, dude. Symlinks. I have my iTunes library on my much larger secondary hard drive so I have more room on my boot drive for apps.
Not that I'm sure this is actually relevent to anything real.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Location of iTunes library file not changeable (and in users' homedir).
Mine is on a server. Try LOOKING at the preferences.
Bullshit. That's the location of the audio files, not of the database.
No watching of the library folders.
Try LOOKING at the menu bar. It's called Consolidate Library...
Yeah, it's not automatic, but it is a one step process.
Bullshit, that's copying all the files already in the library to a central location. I want to copy files to that location and iTunes to notice them (=adding them to the library DB).
My god.
burning the purchased tracks to a DVD-R for safe keeping, deleting all protected files from iTunes, then dropping in all the unprotected files.
So now, i have no simple way of going thru my whole library picking out the previously protected now unprotected file.
Well, you have a list of all your unprotected files on your DVD-R. Just deprotect them again, apply the fix to the newly deprotected files, then use them to replace the same tracks in your iTunes library.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
True, but is it a requirement that they have to give back ALL their changes given that the license doesn't require it?
Remember, they did not *have* to release darwin as free software. Yet they did. This is kind of like critizising someone who gives money to the homeless, but decides to keep some for themselves.
The open source comminuty can be exceptionally snotty in this regard. A corporation helps out the community, then some people in the community turn around and istead of saying, gee thanks, they say, "But I want ALL your ip! You are an evil company!".
And taking and not giving back is perfectly in keeping with open source principles, and even some free software licenses like BSD. If it were not, it would be explicitly forbidden in the definiton of free software or open source!
It's not in line with copyleft, but copyleft is not everything.
Peace
First, it makes it look like they are combating piracy. It looks good on paper when they go to tell the RIAA how they have been fighting piracy "we disabled the latest version of Hymn, but a workaround was found quickly." So long as they are doing what they can, the RIAA won't complain.
Second, it prevents someone from the RIAA ascertaining what percentage of tracks shared are the iTunes version nearly as easily.
Think about it. If you leave the ID tag in there, the RIAA can download a bunch of files from P2P networks and very quickly and easily determine what percentage of them were purchased from the iTMS. Apple doesn't want this at all--if that number ever does become significant, they don't want the RIAA coming to them and saying "20% of all songs being shared over P2P networks were originally purchased on the iTMS..."
Unlikely? Sure, especially since m4a files are still relatively rare on p2p networks (though the number of them is growing), but Apple doesn't want it to ever be an issue.
If there is an ID tag that is unique to decrypted files and can be quickly scanned for, they can ascertain this percentage without any difficulty in a selection of downloaded music. Otherwise they have to compare the decrypted stream to the decrypted stream of the original for each individual song, which requires identifying each individual song and then matching it with the original--a much more drawn out process than scanning for the presence of a tag.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
So you want iTunes to take files that it isn't aware of, copy them to a different directory and then become aware of the files? Doesn't that sound slightly contrdictory to you? Or do you mean you want it to copy files to the library folder as you add them? IN which case I suggest you check the options again.
No, he's talking about having the files in a directory somewhere and setting it up so that if he (or anyone else, think server here) copies a file into that heirarchy, iTunes automatically notices it and adds it to the database.
It should it be easy enough to script the refresh, but its still more of a pain that it should be.
The reason for this, conversely, is that Apple is really trying to minimize the times that people think of "Files" instead of "Music" or "Photos". But its one of those things that works well in the normal case, but falls down when people try to do interesting things outside the box with it.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Hymn was written to extend fair use of the iTMS, by allowing you to play the files that YOU bought in the iTMS in devices that DON'T support Apples DRM.
Ok so let's suppose you have a Mac, an iPod, a Windows PC, a Linux box, and another AAC-capable player.
You buy a file from the iTMS. It plays in your Mac, your iPod, and the Windows machine using iTunes. But you want to play it in your Linux box and in the other AAC player. And maybe in WinAmp, since I've heard that iTunes for Windows is a resource hog (I'm very glad I use a Mac).
So, you use Hymn to de-DRM-ize your files. The new files work in the non-Apple players, but not in iTunes.
Well... who gives a f**k if iTunes refuses to play the new files? You already have the original files, which play nicely in iTunes! So you don't want to have duplicate files in your computer(s)? Well, leave only the copy that works in each machine! Duh!
I see this as an issue if you want to play the files in iTunes in more than five machines all in different places. (If they are in the same network, you can use the iTunes sharing feature). But quite frankly that is far from typical for a normal user. Very, very far.
What I see is a bunch of pirates who want to share the Hymn-ized files illegally, and don't want to leave evidence to trace them back in the files. Users who really want to enforce their fair use rights should have no problems since they still can play their iTMS songs in all their AAC-capable players.
Yeah, because Apple has really clamped down on thosee poor X11 using bastards.
Excuse me, but wtf?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!