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Cracking iTunes' DRM with JHymn
comforteagle writes "Howard Wen has interviewed 'FutureProof' of the JHymn project, a DRM removal application for iTunes song files laden, or 'crippled' as some say, to prevent filesharing. FutureProof tells us how Apple's DRM works, how to rip it out using JHymn, how they build on the work of 'DVD' Jon Johansen, and how to upgrade to that brand new iShuffle safely."
I hope stuff like this teaches companies no one wins with DRM. Not themselves, as they're made look incompetent when DRM is cracked ("Protected CDs" rippeable pressing CTRL?), and certainly not their customers.
If it's digital, and the end user can see / hear it, it can be copied. Perfectly. Deal with it, and make it interesting to buy instead of pirating.
Admittedly, without the thrill of "fighting the man", but in this case "the man" is giving you virtually everything you asked for (inexpensive music you can try before you buy with the ability to download exactly what you want and make mix CDs, which you could then rip as well without needing this tool.) Now Apple is going to have to crack down again.
What does this win us? The music industry can point to this as another example of why the restrictions need to be in the hardware and the hardware manufacturers are already in their pocket as far as the next generation of motherboards are concerned. Thanks to the pirates, those of us who buy the stuff again have to pay with further restrictions.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
for iTunes song files laden, or 'crippled' as some say, to prevent filesharing.
or crippled files to prevent me from doing whatever I want with the files I BOUGHT, thankyouverymuch. I don't share, I don't pirate, but I demand total freedom when it comes to changing from one's format to another.
It's much easier to use the five-finger discount.
I know you're joking, but that's just plain stealing! you're physically taking property from the store without paying for it. at least if you download it illegally, nobody loses anything (assuming that you wouldn't buy it otherwise, i know i don't at the high prices that some of these CDs sell at)
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
But the penalties for real stealing are much less than fake stealing.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
In other words, it's harder to rationalize stealing from a real store than it is to rationalize stealing from an online-only store.
It's got nothing to do with either law or morality. It's just got to do with how far you're willing to delude yourself. Is that it?
You can also burn any iTunes track to CD. Only limit is you can only burn 5 copies of a playlist before you have to change the songs in the playlist. Which means if you or your friend spring for the cost of a CD, you can share any song you like, as many times as you like, with whomever you like, just like other physical media.
I think that's a super middle-ground. Steve Jobs has discussed MANY times that DRM will be cracked, but FairPlay is pretty good. Apple puts a sticker on all their iPods that says, "Please don't steal music." Please point me to a better approach to DRM or filesharing scheme. Yes, DRM sucks, but it's not going anywhere if you want to use downloaded RIAA music.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
I love folks complaining about "crippled" iTunes songs.
They forget that Apple has SET THE STANDARD for sensible DRM that is reasonable for the consumer.
I've been around a long time, and have seen plenty of stupid stuff. Divx (in the DVD space) moved things back, lawsuits and claims about the mp3 format itself, a joke.
But I've also got a sense of history. Before apple came along legal online music was GHASTLY.
You think iTunes is "laden" and "crippled" with DRM? People have forgotten that before apple came along there was a fragmented music space with DRM that meant you couldn't move songs between computers, burn them to CD's, and stores run by companies that were no fun to do business with. Subs, if you canceled, your music vanished.
For most folks, fairplay is actually fair. Most people don't end up playing on more then five computers. Unlimited burns of a song, and seven burns of a specific CD are reasonably fair. The authorization process isn't terribly painful.
Remember, the RIAA used to claim on their dumb soundbyting site that making a tape copy of a CD was copyright infringment. And they were probably right, it was.
The one big issues with iTunes are lack of open source support (tricky, but they should do better here) and the lock-in to iPods as the portable music player for the service. The issue is that software needs to provide the DRM. Luckily for apple they've got a reasonable ipod product. This lockin will have to evolve though of course, open source and linux are not supported so far.
But from a DRM perspective, they really moved the industry forward. If the media companies had their way we'd be stuck with Sony's ATRAC format.
So, complaints and props to apple.
If it weren't for Apple's DRM on the music sold through the iTMS, there would be no iTMS. No way to buy that one track you like. No way to support the artists that deserve the support. None at all.
Your turn.
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You completely missed the point. The point being: it's less of a headache to walk out of a store with a CD than it is to deal with DRM, and if you get caught stealing a CD, the punishment isn't as severe.
In other words, you like to take other people's words and give them a totally unrelated spin.
It's got nothing to do with either law or morality. It's just got to do with posting flamebaits and being smug. Is that it?
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
If you give up control, you get what you deserve.
sulli
RTFJ.
Yeah, it was really annoying that Apple did that -- the entire reason for that uniqueness was to discourage copyright infringement by putting up a big red flag saying "this song was came from ITMS." Combined with the fact that it (still, hopefully) leaves the Apple user ID the hope was that Apple would sue copyright infringers (like the RIAA, only with an accurate way to tell who's infringing). Instead, Apple forced them to remove the feature, which was stupid because it was in Apple's own best interests to have it there in the first place!
I wouldn't call it a "fix;" I would call it a "regrettably necessary workaround of Apple's stupidity."
Just FYI, there are several programs (for example, Leechster) that allow people to download from iTunes shares instead of just stream. It's still not in the same league as Kazaa, since you have to be in close physical (or logical, in the case of VPNs) proximity to use it, though.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Now if Apple licensed Fairplay playback to device manufactures and software developers, that might change people's opinion but as it stands now, Apple computer has a monopoly of fairplay enabled music playback. I would suggest that Apple open Fairplay, but as we all know, the concept of DRM is simply PKI turned upside down. Its a game of digital hide and seek or "security by obscurity," so it is simply not possible to open source any software based DRM scheme.
Lets look at this situation from another angle, if Microsoft was the leading online music retailer and used a format that could only be played back on Microsoft hardware and software products, would people be defending them? The hypocrisy and denial of Apple fanboys on /. is so blatant, its not even amusing anymore.
From the point of view of the RIAA, downloading MP3s is worse than stealing CDs because it implies you are participating in the global piracy rings called P2P services, and probably committing thousands of copyright infringements automatically as people download files from you. While stealing CDs is bad, it doesn't scale the way P2P does.
From the point of view of many Slashdotters, downloading MP3s is better than stealing CDs because they believe the concept of enforcing artificial scarcity for intellectual property is misguided when in reality there is no such scarcity. Stealing CDs is still bad, because CDs are physical objects and thus scarce by nature.
By now you probably think I side with the Slashdotters. Actually lately I have been leaning toward the RIAA (slightly). I can see that enforcing scarcity on IP does provide incentives to produce it; thus encouraging the production of more and higher quality IP (i.e. Hollywood movies, big-name computer games). Without that enforced scarcity, many of the incentives (i.e. $$$) go away, and it is hard for me to see how IP of the quality we have today would continue to be produced. Maybe Windows could be replaced by Linux, but the LOTR movie trilogy, Doom III, World of Warcraft, etc are not like Linux. I would be very sad to see a world which could not produce them.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
...a DRM removal application for iTunes song files laden, or 'crippled' as some say,...
"Crippled" is when something isn't working the way it was intended. Songs from the iTunes Music store work the way they are supposed to. If you don't want DRM laden music, don't buy it.
Two Minus Three Equals Negative Fun -Troy McClure
Exactly! As if I don't have enough coasters as it is! Plus, copy to disk, move it to another computer -- that's so "sneaker net". Why bother with a LAN if you're just going to copy-walk-copy. And last of all, I can't play actual cds on my computers because for at least the last several years, I've been too lazy to connect the cd player to the sound card - just more effort than it's worth.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I don't give a damn about your moral system until you try and impose it on me, e.g., use the government to force me to pay you money to do stuff with my own private property that I would ordinarily be able to do for free.
As far as "God-given property rights" are concerned, even if I weren't agnostic, I'd dearly love to hear you quote the Scriptures which define ideas as property, especially since a great deal of the Scriptures emphasize getting their own message distributed as widely as possible.
Patent and copyrights don't have _anything_ to do with private property, and have everything to do with greedy people who have a greatly-self-inflated idea of the worth of their own ideas trying to force people to give them money they don't deserve.
The thing is, the word "intended" means very different things to the user downloading the songs than it does to the people selling them.
You can't say "works as intended" to a user of the songs, because their intent is different than the DRM designers. DRM is never built to help the customer in any way, only to restrict end-user rights.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People always seem to use the CD-R burning argument in Apple's defence. If you take these steps, you've got a library full of paid-for music that's been compressed twice. Yuk.
If you buy music from iTunes, none of your music is of archival quality. For that, you need to store your music as AIFF of FLAC files.
In an ideal world, where everyone has lots of bandwidth and storage, people would buy their music online in FLAC format, which they can do whatever they like with: burn to CD, convert to MP3 etc. Sadly, that's not the direction we're going in.