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Jon Johansen Breaks iTunes DRM Yet Again
ikewillis writes "Remember earlier today when Apple released an update supposedly blocking the hole in iTMS recently discovered by Jon Johansen? News.com reports that he has already worked around the update, and iTMS can now be accessed from non-Windows/MacOS X systems using the new version of his PyMusique software. You can view his blog entry on the issue (ironically titled So Sue Me). More power to you, Jon!"
One Steve Jobs gets the death penalty for copyright infringement legalized.
Oh, don't worry. They will.
If you don't like the restrictions set on the songs, then don't pay $0.99 to buy it through the iTMS. Buy it or download it somewhere else...
I wonder, did he work around it that quickly, or was he anticipating Apple's fix and already knew another way around it?
...I would be chastising you for inappropriate use of the "Ironic" tag. :)
Bravo, rare to meet someone with a set of balls these days.
Wanna get nasty? - DaNasty
Back when Apple introduced their iTunes Music Store, they offered something unique: one could buy a song for 99 cents no subscription, unlimited CD burns, and iTunes played MP3s. The other online choices were obtaining the music illegally or getting into some draconian subscription thing the big record companies were doing.
Apple didn't put hugely restrictive DRM on the files; you could burn the song to a disc as many times as you wanted or load it onto as many iPods as you wanted. You can move songs pretty easily between Macs without too much hassle. This was great compared to the other schemes the record companies had come up with -- like paying a fee every time you wanted to burn a song to a disc.
Now this guy is circumventing Apple's DRM scheme so that eventually Apple has no choice but to make it even tighter or shut the business down due to piracy. Plus, they're giving Microsoft a great "I told you so" -- remember back when Microsoft crippled Windows Media Player from even ripping 128 bit MP3s to push users into their proprietary media format? From the Wall Street Journal (April 2001):
You want to prove your l33t skills or fight against The Man -- fine, go pick a more serious target (I'm sure the Electronic Frontier Foundation could think items that are more important than free music).
You want to know why companies come up with ridiculously restrictive copy protection schemes? You can thank guys like this.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
More power to you, Jon!
Why do people relish in this?
Yes, yes, I'm sure it would be wonderful if Apple wanted or intended to sell music without DRM. But they, and the content owners - you know, those people who actually have LEGAL RIGHTS to the content - don't intend to do that. And it's their service and their content. Whether or not things "can" be technically done aside, does anyone realize that? Or is that just completely lost in the vacuum of "Information wants to be free"?
You posted all that text just two minutes after the story is posted? I smell a troll.
Apple just drops DRM.
... Apple would be cool.
Then
I dunno what that is. So i'll say yes.
I tried it out - it didn't work for me at all.
I am proud to assist in bankrupting you sir, but the main reason I don't buy CD's is because they still cost almost 4 times the price of a DVD on sale. So, when the record companies get with the times and charge $5 for a CD, I'll start buying again. Till then, have fun trying to file Chapter 11 under the new Republican bankruptcy rules.
This is awesome, Jon is single handedly causing a pretty reasonable DRM scheme to rapidly degrade into something nearly unusable. Thanks man!
1. Make software that breaks old version of iTunes
2. Make software that breaks new version of iTunes
3. Released version that breaks old iTunes
4. Wait for iTunes users to be forced to upgrade
5. Immmediatly release version that breaks new iTunes
6. Impress people
7. ????
8. Profit!
he wrote the GUI for the DVD decryption tool he's famous for, he didn't break CSS.
Why not come up with some software that will let me yank files from my Tivo, dump them into Final Cut / iMovie, and burn my own DVDs after I've edited out the commercials? That would make me happy.
More power to you. That's just beautiful.
You know what you are getting when you buy songs from iTunes, DRM encryption that ties the song to you.
If you don't like their terms, simply don't shop there, and don't buy Apple's music.
Creating these hacks is really like taking the silverware and plates out of a restaurant when you know you are really paying just for the food.
It's so hypocritical how slashdot really realy really hates GPL violators, but cheers something like this.
This is why you guys are a complete joke and have no respectibility whatsover.
Actually, its not jon's fault. It's yours and apple's. You can't say that him breaking iTunes is forcing you to install quicktime and thrash your system. No... that is your fault for buying an apple product which forces you to install quicktime. It just so happens that Jon wrote a patch that caused apple to write a patch and then caused you to download crappy software from apple...
It is your own fault for supporting a company who installs trash software onto your system when you don't want it. If you can't handle that iTunes installs stuff you don't like, then I ask you:
WHY DID YOU INSTALL ITUNES IN THE FIRST PLACE?
let me guess, you are a sucker for the hype that is the iPod. You must be popular with your other ipod buddies.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
"If you don't like the restrictions set on the songs, then don't pay $0.99 to buy it through the iTMS. Buy it or download it somewhere else..."
In the long run, that is a false option. More and more CDs are copy protected and eventually there will be no more cds made, just as they no longer make LPs. Both the content industry and electronics companies have a vested interest in restricting you from exercising your legal rights under copyright law.
Digital Rights Restriction, such as Apple's ironically named "FairPlay," prevent consumers from exercising their right to copy their music to playback the device of their choice.
Consumers have a number of legal rights that DRR'd music prevents them from exercising, including the right to re-sell their used music. The Doctrine of First Purchase says that you can re-sell copyrighted material without needing permission from the rights holder. This is why used bookstores are legal. And this right to resell still applies to music and digital files, hence the reason that used CD stores are legal.
Consumers have a legal right to re-sell their downloaded music, too, but Apple and other vendors of Digital Rights Restricted music make it technically impossible for consumers to exercise their legal rights under copyright law.
So, it isn't a matter of "Just by a CD or get your music 'somwhere else' and shut up." Fighting the indiscriminate appropriation of consumers legal rights by companies use Digital Rights Restriction technology is an important moral and legal issue
Maybe Apple should pay Jon to build a better DRM. At least he'd be doing something legal for a change.
What if you want to play it on your Linux box?
Shouldn't I be allowed to play something I paid for on my Linux box?
His server seems to be /.ed
The blog entry is:
The
iTunes Music Store recently stopped supporting iTunes versions below
4.7 in an attempt to shut out 3rd party clients. I have reverse
engineered the iTMS 4.7 crypto which will once again enable 3rd party clients to communicate with the iTMS.
Yet another moron with a 700000 ID...can we please ban everyone with an ID from 700000-799999?
Let me just say that DVD-Job is nothing short of the Denial of Service attack. I hope they are taken down. When is /. going to learn that you can't flood sites, steal music, or copy DVDs without repercussion?
Even if every person who downloaded music from the Internet did so after paying for the music, such as through iTunes (I don't know if this hack involves circumventing the payment system or only the DRM attached to paid-for songs; I presume that it is the latter, because if it were the former then Apple and others would have a case against Jon for contributory copyright infringement and would have filed that suit already), your store would be suffering just the same.
Your problem is a business model that is becoming increasingly obsolete. Your solution is not to blacklist pirates, but rather to adapt to a market where people legally buy and download music from the Internet rather than purchasing it at physical record stores. If you can't compete in that market, then it's nobody's fault but your own that your business fails as a result.
Failed businesses are nothing to be ashamed of. But you need to do a cost-benefit analysis of each option in front of you. Among them are continuing as you are, adapting to the new marketplace, pursuing your blacklisting system (which only affects pirates, not lawful downloaders), and bailing out.
And remember: Shit happens.
...then Johansen will release another workaround ad infinitum, ad nauseum...zzzzzz
Does this fool really have nothing better to do than waste his time like this? Could one of you fix Mr Johansen up with your cousin or something? He really needs to get out more.
Let's do all we can to make legal online music downloading look like a shaky, invalid alternative to CD-buying, so we can ensure that record labels never change and embrace the new model. After all, we can't just NOT BUY THE SONGS if we don't like the DRM, right?
Every time this gets cracked, it hurts online legal music. The labels are already paranoid as it is, and this is exactly why. They know these kinds of people are out there waiting to crack it all. You're only hurting the iTunes music store and the business model as a whole.
Good thing this was Apple.
Any other company would have just had him killed already.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
This isn't going to be popular with the 'no DRM is good DRM' brigade. So Sue Me.
So Jon's done it again. Well, the man has testicles of steel because Apple are currently taking legal action against another single person. Making the blog title 'So Sue Me' is just asking for it, IMHO. Even if (and I say *if*) Apple haven't a leg to stand on, they can afford far fancier lawyers. Rather him than me.
What's the knock-on effect ? Apple have to have some DRM in place to keep their corporate music-land clients happy, or the contracts they've signed will be revoked, and they'll lose loadsamoney. This is just a guess, but I'm pretty sure the RIAA/whoever wouldn't have given Apple carte-blanche to sell their music without some degree of "protection" (whether required or not is a different argument).
So, Apple will have to respond. Off the top of my head, I think they'll be forced into making the iTMS contact Apple regularly for a right to play the library (similar to Kerberos). The right to play will be governed by whether the library is "legal" or not (ie: if any tracks have the same signature as on the iTunes website, but no DRM, prevent playback of either the entire library or just those songs.
Or they could do DRM management completely on the server, change the file format to heavily encrypt the system, change the OS, hell, change the machine hardware if necessary.
The point is that none of this is good for me, or in fact for Apple, but they'll be forced to go down this road because their clients will demand their "protection", and people like Jon will keep on breaking anything too lenient. So, in the end, Apple either lock the system down completely using hardware, or they drop the music business. Well done guys, now everyone's happy.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
of iTunes and see if this is all he is after. That is what he says anyway.
I guess you'll be blacklisting anyone who downloads legally-purchased music from itunes or puretracks eh. And those amazon.ca customers are going to have to go to the top of the list.
Dude, if your business is suffering, it might be because you're frightening the customers with the Dirty Harry act.
I'm no fan of DRM, but it's about time SOMEBODY finally has the right goal in mind. Make legitimacy more convenient. I've been paying $10 a month for nearly 2 years now to Rhapsody. Since then, I've made 0 (zero, just in case any of you thought it was a typo.) MP3 downloads. Why? Their subscription service is significantly faster and easier. Okay, subscription's not for everybody, but the price is right and the service beats P2P.
Believe it or not, the *AA can compete with free. I'm looking forward to the day that this is more widely understood. I really want the instant gratification of buying content on-line.
"Derp de derp."
It was posted to a previous story. Someone is trying to start a new troll.
I hope that helps.
(TechnoPolitical rhetoric for the modern age).
My digital rights don't need management.
Just some food for thought...
If Apple really doesn't want to have to use DRM on it's iTunes downloads, and they write patches that are supposed to fix loopholes and these patches are easily defeated...
Is it conceivable that Apple doesn't care if the patches are easily circumvented? "Yeah, we'll fix something we don't really want, and if you happen to break it, you outfoxed us *wink wink nudge nudge*
Just a thought.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
I mean, if you want a DRM hero, isn't the EFF a better role model than this guy? Yeah, we might all hate DRM, but this guy really is breaking an agreement HE MADE to access the iTMS. I'm not really impressed with his sense of ethics. If I borrow your gun and promise not to shoot you, then I DO shoot you to protest gun laws, how is that even a little right? So, don't attack my analogy, tell me why it was OK for him to lie to Apple and say that he WOULD respect their DRM and then turn around and crack it. Simple... it's NOT right.
Yeah, I guess I'm funny like that.
It's too bad that these guys don't spend their efforts on something truly useful for the Linux community, such as building and/or improving:
1. Compatability with Garmin GPS hardware/software
2. Visio compatibility
3. Linux tax and finance software
Instead, they're just focusing on low-hanging fruit. And it's not great fruit - I'd rather just rip my CDs to MP3 instead of paying $1 for an un-DRM'd song.
The guys who work on the Kernel, Mozilla, OOo, PostgreSQL, etc, deserve a hell of a lot more press and credit than these guys.
This just shows that no form of DRM, CSS, or any other content "protection" will _ever_ work in the long run.
If I remember correctly, he never did break the DRM, instead he captured the audio file before it went through the iTunes software, which puts the DRM into the audio file ... therefore there is no DRM to break.
And no, I didn't RTFA
Talk about double-dog-daring Apple to haul your butt into civil court and ask for damages.
And just because the guy won one legal battle does not mean he'll win the next one.
*yawn*
Jon breaks something for the sake of breaking it*. The other party patches it.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
(ok - but now he says he's doing it for the sake of linux users...)
-----
*: if not true, then sell your services as a white hat consultant. You could make money.
Though arguably his targets are getting this service for free along with the gratis notification of his fans...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Prolly a Troll.. But...
/. readers have ever worked for a single company. I'd be thankful that you got that long out of a single record store - esp when battling against B*stBuy and WallyWorld.
Face it. The business landscape has changed. Whining and blaming isn't going to help anybody. If you are that worried, then start an education program. Explain to your customers why pirating music is bad.
On the other hand, I just think of how the horse and buggy makers felt when the automobile was released. Their business was going away, and there was nothing they could do about it. Some adapted and became metal shops and embraced the new business opportunity, many others went away.
12 years ago, a record store was prolly a great investment. You got 12 years of support out of it. That a lot longer than most
Oh yea, you can prolly blame the big box stores as well. But your post didn't even mention those stores. I think that those types of stores would have done more damage than internet piracy. Wallyworld for example is within a 20 minute drive of 90% of the USA population. Total domination.
That post is at least a year old.
I guess the biblical passage "Love thy neighbor" doesn't extend to "loving thy teenage customers", or "forgiving the pirates, for they do not know."
*Shrugs*
My digital rights don't need management.
No, Apple does not get a "get out of jail free card".
Cracking these restrictive DRM schemes is a good thing.
People should be allowed privately enjoy their purchases as they see fit.
Just because Apple makes iPod doensn't give them the right to stop people from using technology to move their files around on their own personal systems as they see fit.
It's probably a copy and paste that he spews on every music related story because I saw the exact story on /. a LONG time ago.
This is the funniest thing I've ever heard. The guy uses [sic] after writing leet as "lete," and calls the internet... The Internet. Not to mention that the other kid replies that he'd get respect for posting a CD online. Hahahaha. Troll.
blog & fiction: jd87
The music industry is plagued by an enormous problem of legacy. Creativity has been stifled by the labels' continuing drive towards commercialization. We have "artists" like Gwen Stefani releasing cover after cover, first covering Talk Talk's It's My Life then covering If I Were A Rich Man from Fiddler on the Roof, and both covers are atrocious. These are examples of an industry which is creatively bankrupt and where profit is the bottom line. It seems like nowadays the only place you can find creativity is in underground music, before the industry has commercialized and destroyed it.
Music needs a new distribution model, one where the artist is in the driver's seat and has complete creative control over their work. The Internet has rendered traditional music labels obsolete, they're aware of this, and they're fighting their eventual downfall tooth and nail. They will lose.
DRM is based around cryptographically unsound principles. In order to play DRM encrypted music you need the encrypted content and the key on your local system. Given this you have everything you need to unlock the encrypted data, it's only through obfuscation in the client that the key is hidden.
Eventually the industry will have to come to terms with this fact and the fact that their distribution model is antequated and obsolete. We need people to continue proving DRM is an unsound technology so eventually they give up on it entirely.
come out of the woodwork to defend DRM. Its quite entertaining.
Instead of suing this very smart individual... Pay him. He knows more about what you are doing then you do.
"A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'" - DNA
I laughed my ass off the first time I read that joke (after realizing that it is in fact satire). Thanks for the laugh.
I don't see why those on the conservative right are so interested in defending copyright.
They are protecting the profits of people they hate, aren't they?
Why not let the honor system work? If the music/movies you make appeal to a crowd that wants to break the law and take the music/movie for free, then maybe you should just stop making that sort of music/movie in the first place. If the message you're selling includes glorifying theft or being a thug or whatever, don't be surprised if the people that like that sort of thing ignore copyright.
You can't preach one message then expect people to act differently.
So conservatives should give up on copyright and just let things play out.
The industry as it stands now deserves to sink into oblivion. Let it.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
"Back when Apple introduced their iTunes Music Store, they offered something unique: one could buy a song for 99 cents no subscription, unlimited CD burns."
Apple's Terms of Serivice say they don't even "sell" songs, instead you are offered the chance to pay for a license to use the song. --And as for that great deal for $.99, well Apple has used it's ironically named "FairPlay" Digital Rights Restriction system to continually erode the value of your purchase by taking away the rights they promised you when you bought it. They reduced the number of times you can burn a playlist from 10 to 7, they shrunk the network you can share music on, and now they have reduced the number of listeners from 5 simultaneous listeners to 5 daily listeners. Tomorrow, who knows, maybe you'll only be allowed to listen to a song a certain number of times per day. The DRR allows Apple to control your purchase, even after you have bought it. That is just plain wrong.
Back in 1984, Apple leveraged the imagery of "1984" in an ad featuring a Hammer thrower taking on Big Brother. Now Apple has lost that sense of perspective. They are part of the establishment now.
my ipod was free, id never buy an apple product
my free mini mac should ship soon too
you could of been more original
cos iam sitting here at this freelance gig..
Funny this was posted back in 10/22/2003
h ol d=1&commentsort=0&tid=141&tid=188&mode=thread&cid= 7278955
Here you go:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=83129&thres
...some entity gets tired of this guy's shenanigans and puts out a hit on him?
He's pissed off a lot of rich, powerful people/companies and committed what they see as the most grievous sin-- doing something that might negatively affect their profits.
People have certainly been killed for less.
iPod Shuffle is the shit.
or on the flip side, how about when they put as much money into making a CD that they do into making a DVD
If DRM is any way comparable to rape, why do you let yourself be raped by continuing to shop from Apple? There should be no reason to even break iTunes DRM because just buying a song is like getting raped.
You just basically said you like getting raped.
Holy smokes. I just totally smoked your comment right back at you. You need to learn to debate better, son. Good God, time for my victory lap.
Maybe your record store is hurting because your business model is crap. The most extensive Christian Rock section? LMAO!!
What would Jesus do, there, Christian? I'm pretty sure he wouldn't make a big deal out of ripping off talented bands, perverting the lyrics, and then rebadging it as "Christian Rock."
Christian Rock. What a dweeb. LMAO.
1. Apple: [Fixes DRM holes]
2. Johansen (and the hackers he's serving as a cover for): [Makes new DRM holes]
3. GOTO 1.
MEANWHILE
[Apple, to record labels] You see there is no way to remove the DRM from iTunes purchases.
[Apple's users] Cool, I can remove the DRM from iTunes purchases.
EVERYONE WINS
Why not come up with some software that will let me yank files from my Tivo, dump them into Final Cut / iMovie, and burn my own DVDs after I've edited out the commercials?
They already have, it's called ReplayTV and DVArchive.
Oh, I'm sorry, You said *Tivo*. You have my commiserations.
Da Blog
I can't understand the people who are dumping on "DVD Jon" for breaking the iTunes DRM scheme. I am quite fond of Apple, and like their products, but I continue to stay away from both the iPod, and iTunes. Why?
- Because they attempt vendor lock in: I can only easily use the iPod with iTunes.
- Becuase the files have DRM, and can only be easily used on iTunes, and the Ipod: In order to use iTunes music on my linux box (which I use an MP3 jukebox,) I must break the DRM.
- Because iTunes wants to manage and take over my music -- It wants to be my SOLE music application. I much prefer to manage my music files in the filesystem.
The system, while probably the best DRM scheme out there, is still too locked up for me.
DVD Jon is making tools that allow complete ligitmate fair use of iTunes music. If I buy a song from the iTunes store, break the DRM, and use it on my linux box, record it to an MP3 CD for use in my Sony MP3 CD player (and perhaps a car CD MP3 player as well,) I am not breaking the law. This is fair use. Unless I break Apple's DRM, I cannot do this. (Ripping to CD and then re-encoding doesn't count. Plus its a waste of my time.)
We as consumers should NOT allow the music industry to take away our fair use rights, and in the process, rip us off. Going along with even the pretty liberal Apple DRM scheme is still supporting the music industry in that goal.
News.com posted their story about this at 15:37pmPST.
Boingboing posted theirs at 15:40PST.
I don't mean to go offtopic, but is Slashdot regularly slower than other tech sites? Are Boingboing and news.com usually so fast (at ~100 minutes)?
Test signature: Brett Walker
and you are envious.
I payed Apple for the song, I should be free to do what I want with it. Which is why the DMCA is such garbage. Modifiying stuff that I own should not be illegal. I'm not committing copyright infringement, i'm paying the money to the people who produce/own/distribute the art. Please don't tell what I can or can't do with stuff I purchased.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
That is the biggest load of crap I have ever read. Studies have shown online music trading increases demand for songs which increases sales. No reliable source has ever shown they hurt sales. If you wanna talk about piracy why not ban FM radio too cause i can copy a song off the radio just as easy as a computer. BTW nice way to deal with a "pirate" yell at him and lose a customer in your failing buisness.
Maybe that is the reason that no one shops at your store. Who listens to that crap? People initially flocked to your store because it was new and it was probably recommended in their church bulliten or something.
nice language.
good luck with that. How exactly are you going to compile this list? How do I get on? Who will I sue if I am on it?
TRUTH - their father is a pathetic. That is why the kids laugh at them. I feel sorry for your kids.
well if im not mistaken, you just lost a sale because you freaked out on that kid, even though he was gonna put it online, he was still gonna buy it from you. CD's are yesterdays news, if you compare the weight of it, an iPod with 500 songs on it weighs a hell of a lot less than 500 songs worth of cds. I'm not sayin piracy isn't a big part of the problem, but you can't go blamin some 14 year old runnin kazaa for your failing business. It's the specialty market you have to cater to these days, start sellin vinyl or somethin, something you can't download. I admit, I dont buy cd's anymore, hell I dont even burn cds anymore. If I need to take my music someplace, I drop it on my mp3 player, or on my jumpdrive and I'm out, and I don't have to carry around a 48 slot faux leather CD wallet and try to remember which cd has what song on it.
i have a roll of electrical tape.
Let's not forget that Linux still sucks as a desktop. It's not just visio or finance software missing... it's simply not usable by the average user.
Try following: Find fancy software, go to fancy software page, download fancy software, doubleclick on fancy software archive, extract fancy software, drag fancy software to your favourite folder, start fancy software. use fancy software Does not work, right?
Linux is a nerd tool.
Notice it's in italics. Given the editors can't be bothered to vett articles (remember the "battery booster sticker" article a few weeks ago?), it's not really the editor's opinion.
Given all the disgust lately (comments grumbling about stories is nothing new, but it seems unscientifically at an all-time high) I would say the majority of in-story commentary doesn't speak for Slashdot readers at all. In fact, a lot of commentary offered up by story submitters is poorly worded, shoot-from-the-hip crap that would get modded "troll" if it were a comment.
Please help metamoderate.
What is this kid German?
last time i saw a 1 day turn around, windows and their stupid registration thing... 1 day turn around by germans the day XP was released...
If they want to not have piracy, why dont they offer it for FREE? i think Linux has done well...
I like iTunes and their attempt at DRM, but lets take a stand like Napster... they dont care and its legal now... im tempted to go to them because for 15$ i can get all the songs id ever want, then overnight just have my machine convert... delet, YAY 15$ for a ton of songs thats great after 16+ songs...
If there is a will, there is a way, and usually its a german who doesnt give a flying pathooie about our system
... I remember this last time you posted the exact same story. Quite a few places actualy.. see:
2 75
h ol d=1&commentsort=0&tid=141&tid=188&mode=thread&cid= 7278955
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/10/2/103735/
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=83129&thres
So one and half years later... are you still in bussiness?
4 times the price of a DVD? Where the heck do you buy CDs at? Here (the US) DVDs on sale are about $14 for new releases. About $10 for older movies. New CDs are $10 to $15 and used CDs are $4 to $8. I'd like to know where you have to spend $40 to buy a CD.
It is hard to tell if this man is talented and misguided or talented and visionary. There are very significant arguments on each side. On the one hand everyone would like to pay nothing and get everything(myself included). On the other hand people should be rewarded for their contributions/work. This issue should not be over-simplified...
Ok people, let's review the facts, since most people don't seem to know or read...
1. DVD Jon lives in Norway, where the majority of this stuff, including the release of DeCSS which breaks DVD encoding, is illegal. The court case failed.
2. Nobody broke Apple's DRM. All this does is retreive the music before the iTunes client adds the DRM. How is this possible? Apple's iTunes client adds the DRM because it needs the client to generate the key. Doing it any other way would likely be a tremendous processor increase on the iTunes servers.
3. Apple can sue DVD Jon if they choose, but it will likely do no good.
The way I see it, there's only one safe path for Apple. They should release an iTunes client for Linux along with a statement that any further attempt to block their DRM will be followed up with a lawsuit. Sure, the lawsuit part is either a bluff or a waste of time, but at least they eliminate the "It's just so we can run on Linux" argument.
" who actually have LEGAL RIGHTS to the content"
Nobody owns the legal RIGHTS to anything. They have a copyright, but a copyright isn't a blanket cover for anything you'd like.
A copyright doesn't give "them" the power to say "You may only listen to this in the shower while humming the song". Its simply a restriction on copying the file.
This is not breaking laws, people must buy the music.
As to RIGHTS. If I have the RIGHT to listen to this song anyway I like after I've paid for it, then the record companies and Apple are taking away my RIGHTS.
And lets be real. The RIAA would like to define things as "You can listen to this the way we choose. Any other way makes you a thief". Its so ludicrous that some of you kids actually believe it.
Thank god not everybody is as passive as you about losing your RIGHTS. Just so you can save a few days because you've gotta have it NOW. Cripes.
The proper capitalization is Internet.
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
What simplified world do you live in in which all (or almost all) conservatives support copyright and all (or almost all) liberals oppose it? You would be in for a rude shock if the conservatives actually went and all threw in the towel on it: you'd find that most of the liberals would still be supporting copyright, and nothing would have changed.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"We have "artists" like Gwen Stefani"
Am I the only person who thinks she sounds like Mr. Ed with her trademark vocal trembles?
It was cute on the first song 10 years ago. But now, she's just annoying.
Listen to it. Once you realize she sounds like a horse, you laugh when you hear her sing.
Cached link to the site
Great. We're not just battling duplicate threads on /., we're also battling duplicate troll posts. Oh well. At least we kept this one away for 2 years.
My digital rights don't need management.
Apple will find a way to pinpoint which user accounts are purchasing songs through something other than the iTunes client, and then proceed to lock those accounts.
Karma Schmarma
... "So Slashdot Me".
Ooooh, I like my new shiny iPod... iTMS is so revolutionary that it will replace CD's... and anyway there's only ever one good song per CD... and DRM is kinda bad, but Apple DRM is special good. Thank you thank you thank you apple... Steve Jobs is a genius...and if iTMS goes away, whatever will I do, although in a few year, my iPod won't be so hip, and the $300 I've paid to iTMS is probably wasted, but anyway, something newer and shiner will come along... oooh, look, shiny new... DVD Jon is bad, because he's stopping the magic juju from Apple.
Ditched your old employees for more clean cut ones? You don't give a shit about your employees so why should anyone give a shit about your store? I know this was a troll, but geez....
Karma: Neutered
...that some math guy in india is behind all this.
I have to say is one of the quickest hacks for a software update I have seen in some time.
:)
Props Jon you never know you might get an job offer from Steve himself
"The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose." - James Baldwin, American author
By the way, Jon, what's your username again?
(~Kylu)
"Angering them like this is only going to make them want to retreat into their shell"
Good, because it will accelerate the death of the most unwanted industry on the planet.
The sooner the RIAA "retreats", the sooner, they'll die.
You? You're all hip to iTMS now, and in a few years you won't care. Meanwhile, idiots like you say "gee, Fairplay isn't SO bad and anyway, I only care about my special player from Apple called an iPod. Its so good, I don't care about Fairplay. Its just....Fair!"
Well, it's amazing they report this today.
Sometimes they are days slower, sometimes they are days slower and then they repeat the same old story several times within few hours. Sometimes they do not report about nerd news at all. Sometimes they post paid ads for uninteresting things, etc...
Slashdot is now yet another subscription based site, nothing to see here.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
I've got to give the guy credit. I thought it would take at least a couple of days. But to get it out there the same day? wow.
Yes. That's exactly the message being send to record labels regarding online music. It "doesn't work."
Look, I get the argument against DRM. But for Christ's sake, iTunes' DRM policy has to be one of the most lax there is to start with. I can just recreate my playlist at any time to have infinite burning. I really don't see what the problem here is, but I accept that there are those who will disagree with me here. I just really think people need to consider the repercussions of things like this, because they are big.
If you don't like the DRM, be a grownup and don't buy the songs. Get them from somewhere else. You're ruining it for the rest of us!
Anyone have a mirror of the source for 0.4?
My email addy? should be easy enough.
"Does this fool really have nothing better to do than waste his time like this? "
Do you mean Jon or Apple?
Perhaps he should have titled his blog "So slashdot me"
People arent using his stuff to 'pirate' music, they are using it to develop... um... homebrew games... on their iPods... yeah, thats it!
I agree. Any DRM is too much. Which is why I don't buy iTMS content. As such, it doesn't matter when this guy cracks it. Why do you care?
If you buy DRM content, you indicate to sellers that DRM content is a saleable product. Sure, you can crack it, but you ensure more DRM content comes later. Soon, there is no non-DRM content.
If you think any DRM is too much, don't buy DRM content.
I just wanted to point out that music is the greatest invention in the history of humanity, and filesharing is probably the best thing to ever happen to music. More music for more people = higher quality of life. Too bad the thugs in hollywood don't care about anybody else.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=83129&threshol d=1&commentsort=0&tid=141&tid=188&mode=thread&cid= 7278955
(Benefit the reader, not the poster)
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
You didn't answer his question. Why is apple extra-special-good?
They're no different (other than market share) than anybody else out there. They're not good or better or anything else other than just another whore making a buck off the foolish.
"In the long run, that is a false option. More and more CDs are copy protected and eventually there will be no more cds made, just as they no longer make LPs. Both the content industry and electronics companies have a vested interest in restricting you from exercising your legal rights under copyright law."*
Translation: No more popular RIAA music to rip and distribute widely.
"So, it isn't a matter of "Just by a CD or get your music 'somwhere else' and shut up." Fighting the indiscriminate appropriation of consumers legal rights by companies use Digital Rights Restriction technology is an important moral and legal issue"
Problem is that YOUR SIDE isn't fighting using legal means (in fact your actions are making those who do much harder), and the irony in your side invoking "morals" is especially large, considering the majour religions don't advocate the techniques used by "copyright violaters". You would have been better invoking "ethics". "Human ethics", for that's much more flexible for your purposes.
If you want to prove DRM isn't the way to do, do it by not buying DRM content.
The labels don't understand crypto, they understand money. When you buy this DRM content, you encourage them to sell DRM content.
You don't need to crack it to change their minds, you simply need to not buy it. Money talks.
It's NOT a possibility that record companies will back out of the downloads market - they have no choice, it's here to stay. Apple is only stands to gain popularity with something like this; if people can download legit software without the risks their player and REAL growth potential, OSX & friends - as long as they convince record companies that they're doing the best they can to thwart these hacks they can continue to benefit from the bait that is the iTMS and from which they make little direct profit.
...
There needs to be this competition. If a better music player comes out or if iTunes introduces annoying "bonus features" (privacy invasion, advertisements, etc.) just because they've been able to force users to stick with what would become a music platform, iTMS customers users would be screwed. With this healthy checks and balances system of hackers vs RIAA, RIAA and service providers will not be so smug as to take advantage of us, knowing we might pack up our tunes and leave.
Also, I don't want to hear any arguements about how this fight should be fought in the court room because nobody has the kind of money that the record companies do. Another important distinction between good and evil sides is that the record companies won't stop at a compromise, their thirst is never quenched. This is evident in the large number of personally verifiable legit music lovers that don't irresponsibly share their music collections out. We just want to be legit
oh shit, dinner's ready
Jason
This is simply amazing slashbotters saying this guy shouldn't be a hero because he violated a EULA click license. Is it april 1st already?
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Why not form a proper counter argument instead of mass ad hominem?
...The client could then decrypt the song using its private key...
... but the cost would be significant even if it did work.
And uh, where exactly is this private key going to be hidden on a users own machine that they can't find it? This is exactly the fundamental flaw of DRM everyone keeps talking about. If the client can decrypt it, the client can be hacked. For software clients this is no longer even a question. For hardware clients, we're just not sure yet
Note: Things like Palladium which would try to take away a user's "root access" to their system *might* create a platform that could make hard DRM possible, but that's all thoery until it hits the field. (And it's questionable whether customers will swallow that particular cactus bulb. Some folks speculate the only reason many products *cough*DVD*cough* survive today is because customers know they can get around supposed restrictions.)
I doubt that they really care that much if you rip off the RIAA or whatever, but what they do care about is getting you to build up a library of music that can be played back on your iPod and no other portable player. They have always said that they didn't expect to make money on the ITMS, that it was to encourage people to buy iPods. Well, what better way to encourage them to let them build up large libraries of music that must be played back on an iPod?
;-)
Well, that's my theory, anyway.
And I'm never wrong.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Its worse than that. Apple is now the face on the screen.
DVD Jon is the person with the hammer.
So ironic...most of these kids weren't born when that ad was made, and so they don't understand how unbelievable ironic all of this is.
Amazing.
Gee, you don't think imposing the DRM on every single file uploaded by the servers would be very CPU-intensive, so Apple's been laying the task off on the clients... Do you?
I suspect that, if they want to solve this problem, Apple is going to have to invest in a hell of a lot of iron -- and right when the RIAA is trying to raise the prices. Yikes.
The used music store in my town is thriving. People buy used CDs, "listen to them" for a while, and then sell them back for a fraction of what they paid. The store makes money over and over again on the same merchandise, and even more money when people find music they like and keep the CD. And it's all perfectly legal! For the store owner, anyway. (And for now...)
Somewhere, deep within the rotting core of A.P.P.L.E. A conversation is overheard....
"Mr Nitti, thankyou for comming. It seems we have a hole in our DRM. That hole is Jon Johansen. We need that hole plugged"
(Cue evil laugh...)
God damn, this text again?! What's the origin of this anyway?
This doctrine prevents a copyright holder or vendor (such as Apple) from filing a claim against you for re-selling an item, but it doesn't say that the original seller (Apple, in this case) has to make it easy or possible for you to do so.
It doesn't say that because the issue didn't originally arise: content was sold on physical media, and of course, you could resell those. That's why the doctrine of first sale was created.
In other words, your "rights" are not being violated by DRM.
Many people would say that DRM is violating the social contract under which copyright exists in the first place: it prevents content from becoming public domain, and it prevents people from reselling it. Both of those are rights that we, the people, clearly reserved for ourselves when we created copyright.
I think the solution is pretty simple: if companies want to use DRM, let them try, but then they can't simultaneously claim copyright protection. In fact, the courts could simply not consider content available under DRM "published", so copyright really shouldn't apply.
They act like Jon is some super-hero who invented a revolutionary hack.
Hymn has been breaking Apple's DRM forever, and it still works perfectly. Oh, and you get to use the real itunes client.
I wouldn't call this am "arms race", I'd call it a "yawn race".
"The copyright owners own the content, period, and get to decide how it's used, by whom, and under what conditions, whether you like it or not"
You're so wrong; you've bought the smoke and mirrors.
Copyright is about copying for commercial purposes. It does not give the content creator special ability to control how its used once its sold.
Dude, this is basic stuff here, and you've got it *ALL WRONG*.
Along with meteorologists, /. editors are the only people I know who can screw up that much and still have a job.
No sig for you!!
... that the poster feels it's ok to repost someone elses story that argues against internet piracy.
They may SAY they licensed it, but they charged sales tax, which in a state that doesn't charge sales tax on purchasing a license to use, means that I bought the song outright.
My bet is that a hack this elaborate was done by one of ITMS competitors (Napster, REAL, M$) and given to DVD Jon from some sort of L33T H4XOR pseudonym. DVD Jon posted it thinking he was helping a comrade stay anonymous, but he was really just a p4wn in a corporate dirty trick.
Apple isn't loosing any money if I remove the DRM off an itunes song. Nor is it a copyright violation since no artwork was copied. A closer analogy would be apple saying "YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO OPEN YOUR IPOD EVEN THOUGH YOU OWN IT". Or Microsoft saying "YOU CAN ONLY INSTALL MICROSOFT CERTIFIED APPLICATIONS ON YOUR SYSTEM".
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Alright, I get the first one, but not the other two. To be fair, I did the Slashdot thing and only read the first part of the comment before responding to it. At least the moderators were also all taken and moderated me up. ;)
I would watch out if I were him. Don't think it's beneath corporations to "erase" problems.
Yea..yea Maybe I'm paranoid. But paranoia keeps you alive!
And we'll still have freeloaders and a modern, Internet version of Peter Pan who says it's all okay.
Okay, as embarrassing as it is, I somehow typed "Peter Pan" instead of "Robin Hood". Guess seeing this page once really did permanently affect my brain...
And hey, in general when I read this I have always thought "Hell yeah!"
What I find interesting is now I am seeing posts saying the DRM is bad because it "erodes the fair use rights we have always traditionally had when we purchased music on CDs".
This just got me thinking. Maybe the adaptation to the digital age has to be a two-way street? In addition to the RIAA needing to rethink its evil ways, maybe we also have to consider that the world has changed since the days of CDs. And not all changes are good for everybody.
Perhaps our "traditional" fair use rights also need to adapt with technology. Remember that with power comes responsibility (no Spiderman references please. I know, I also winced when I typed that). We now have the power to digitally transmit music anywhere in the world for close to zero cost. Unfortunately there will always be a few people that will abuse this power. Maybe something does need to change?
Not saying I agree with that idea or not, because I haven't really had time to think it through yet. Just putting it out there for consideration.
Deny everything, admit nothing, demand proof, and reject the proof.
Why are people associating the fact that he's publishing "exploit" code with a crime? It's a crime to use it, to cause damage (which in most cases it's assumed, not proved), not to have or publish it. Or am I wrong? What's the difference between his site and, e.g: packetstorm? Isn't it numbers? Last time I checked, France was doing this kind of thing. I didn't know that USA was doing the same. I sell a licensed gun to you in a shop, taking all the necessary legal considerations. You go out and shoot somebody. Who's the criminal? (and who's to tell that the analogy is incorrect? it's not illegal to download code)
You're being short sighted dude.
What? do you really think that these megalomaniacs infesting the recording industry are going to sit back and then have an epiphany -- "whoa! I just realized that monopolizing an artists rights and screwing over my clients is wrong! Let me change my evil ways!"
Yeah, right.
This is what is really going on in their heads: " Power. I must have power! This Swedish pansy is taking my Power! Must crush him with lawyers and bribed government officials!" (note the "bribed" part)
Read that article by Courtney Love. She describes that what these loons are about is power, first and foremost. They don't care about you and your ideals. All they care about is taking more cash for themselves - even at the expense of their own company! If you want to read that article, go here where you'll find a link.
The only way to stop jackasses like that is to stop buying their damn music That means you go to alternative sources, you sacrifice a little so that you don't get over-regulated by these power-hungry freaks.
-ronPeace
This isn't interesting, it's drivel.
1) No, the copyright owners *don't* get to decide how I use the things I have bought from them (and doubly so if, as is the case with PyMusique, I never agree to their spurious 'Terms of Service'); they only have the right to say whether I can *further distribute* their copyright work. It's called 'Fair Use'.
2) It is OK to break encryption and reverse engineer my own property. See above 'Fair Use'
3) We all believe in Copyright, but what you are espousing isn't copyright.
Hate to nitpick, but it is only available in WMV and RealPlayer. I wish it was in QuickTime...
So, when the record companies get with the times and charge $5 for a CD, I'll start buying again.
Wierd, I already do that...on iTunes.
You don't have an inherent right to music. If you think CDs are overpriced, you don't magically have the right to steal it (and yes, it's theft...if GPL violations are "stolen source code" then piracy is theft).
BALLS!!
"So convoluted schemes of symmetric encryption and security by obscurity are developed to store this private key in such a way that only certain programs on Alice's device can access it, but nothing else can (nor can Alice access it directly). However, since the machine is under Alice's control it is only a matter of time before she finds it or figures out how to use it to decrypt data as she pleases. This is why nearly every DRM scheme in history has been broken."
The problem with your argument is that it assumes "absolutes". Security isn't absolute. DRM likewise isn't absolute. But it doesn't need to be absolute. All it needs to be is "good enough". If you all crack the DRM on a particular song ten years down the line? Then the impact isn't as bad, as if it was cracked the day of release. Also the twins of "Moore's Law" and "Large Key spaces", mean that the effects of knowing one key, doesn't mean you "have the key to the city " as it were. And last "the nuisance factor". This "tit for tat" can go on forever, but the public at large will quickly tire of the whole thing. Leaving the field to those who do what they do simply because they can, and no reason having to do with the content.
The value that the music industry brings to the table is being dramatically under estimated. What they bring is distribution and advertising.
All of you wannabe folks out there, how far do you think you are going to get without the music industry pushing your recording? Do you think anyone will hear it? Really? If you think that then why does noone know about your song?
Think about it. Bono recently made the observation that pop songs only become pop songs if they are played over and over so they become part of the fabric of our lives. He's right, a great work without promotion is like a tree falling in the woods and I can tell you, nobody hears it.
It's a lot of fun to slam the music industry but do you realize that if they didn't exist virtually everyone you listen would be someone you didn't know? Don't believe it? I'll bet everyone who is a musician reading this can tell you about all the people who don't know they exist.
The music industry may suck, they may be money grubbing pigs, you may hate them, but you are getting value from them. They are making you aware of music, that in at least some cases (given the sales) you like. And there is basically zero chance that without the music industry you would have ever heard of any of these musicians.
Think about that for a while. You guys are whining about people who are helping you. Yeah, they are making a fortune in the process, but you sing songs to yourself every day that you wouldn't know without them.
And just for all the trolls and/or flamers, I have absolutely nothing to do with the music industry, I can't put three notes together, I make no money from them, I do software. This is just me pointing out that you are shooting yourselves in the foot. If you want to fix the "problem" then really fix it, realize the value that those people you hate are bringing to the table and show how you are going to replace that value. That's cool, but anything else is just a bunch of 14 year old whiners living off of Daddy and complaining about it.
Maybe they should install security cameras in the store. They released the patch and already it's cracked. Looks like they need to hire Johansen. I wonder if it held together with bubblegum.
In America, you spam computers In Soviet Russia, computers spam you!
Every time this gets cracked, it hurts online legal music.
No, it only hurts schemes that rely on DRM. It doesn't hurt on-line music sales that don't rely on DRM.
After all, we can't just NOT BUY THE SONGS if we don't like the DRM, right?
The existence of DRM still threatens me because as long as people erroneously believe that they can make DRM work, they will be trying to put all sorts of bogus technological protections in my hardware.
So, I don't buy DRM'ed music, but I still consider it very important, and applaud, that people break the hokey DRM schemes that companies try to build business models around.
I just started to buy house music from http://www.traxsource.com/ as a replacement of vinyl now that I have my digital 1200's: http://www.panasonic.com/consumer_electronics/tech nics_dj/video_flash.asp?/
Traxsource uses an inaudible signature key inside the waveform but the files are DRM free. You can use the files as you see fit, however if they find a file with your signature on it (they can identify you by analysing the file with their software) in the P2P networks they will crack down on you and probably sue if you can't explain yourself (they are a friendly bunch of music lovers after all). You can even burn the file, rip it, re-encode it and the signature will still be there.
Quite similar to Sosumi, the name of team 1015's 2005 robot for the First Robotics Competition. There were some weird names during brainstorming a name....
Their GPL infringes on my right to:
* Copy source code to the project of my choice without attribution.
* Re-sell an application I have coded with said code (using second hand code is legal.).
Anyone that gives me back my legal rights, is someone who deserves encouraging.
---
Totally lame, isn't it? I love that everyone is expected to follow the usage restrictions dictated by the GPL, but "ANY DRM IS TOO MUCH DRM!"
What is the GPL other than a plain-text digital rights management scheme? Seriously, I want to know.
Or when the songs on a cd makes as much at the box office as the movie on a DVD... Nevermind.
Yet another round of the "Apple is secretly good" theory. Apple doesn't give a fuck about you, your rights, the RIAA, or anything else. They are interested in a business model which makes them money. They say bullshit to you (Rip, Mix, Burn, just not more than 5 times), they say bullshit to the RIAA, and they keep everyone satisfied enough to make money. If you think they are on your side then you are hopelessly naive.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
I want this guy to marry my sister.
I need someone like this in the family.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Instead of making the blog title "So Sue Me", he should have gone with "Sosumi", no? It makes sense in the context of the whole issue...
"Because I'm able to legally reclaim my rights they attempt to take away from me."
Sounds fair to me. You and your "Illegal copyright violaters" attempted to take away their rights.* Karma dictates that you suffer likewise[1]. The shame in the whole affair is the innocents caught between you two.
*And I'm NOT just talking about "music", but copyright violation, period.
[1] This question has been asked, many a time, but never answered. Which came first? The piracy, or the protective measures?
Section 1030(a)(2)(c) of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
"Whoever intensionally accesses a computer without authorization
or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains information
from any protected computer if the conduct was involved in an
interstate communication."
He wrote a program that accesses a computer without authorization, and it is used across state lines. It's an open and shut case if he were in the US.
does not mean he can make a better one. that's like assuming that any joker with a wrecking ball could also build a stronger building?
i guess they could hire him (or his crew?) for consulting, but honestly i think Apple knows of the limits of their DRM anyway. they put in JUST ENOUGH for the major labels to give them songs, but not much more. the same way a fairly simple hack reveals the hidden music folder on the iPod. the folder is hidden by default so it takes a deliberate action to reveal it. even if that action is easy, it is not provided by Apple.
Instead it's going to be left as Linux-only for the time being. Not that somebody couldn't port it to Windows, but it's an interesting choice. Maybe they figure they'll get less opposition this way? It certainly solidifies their primary 'excuse' for making the software, which is that they wanted to make an iTunes client program for Linux. If I were a judge and saw that they had made a Windows version and a Linux version, and that the Windows version had 1300% more downloads than the Linux one (which it probably would, just from script kiddies who think it'll let them get free music alone), it certainly makes the software look much more suspect.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
informative post
I have been reading a lot of comments on here where people are bitching about the fact that the system was hacked. "if you don't like DRM, don't use iTMS" - things of that nature.
WTF people. How is corporate america going to learn its lesson unless we teach it to them? Are we just going to bow down to them and do whatever they want us to do? Or are we going to have to prove to them that DRM is pointless and will never work?
We are telling them that we don't mind paying for music. That the rise of illegal file swapping wasn't because it was an easy way to steal music, it was simply a better way to acquire and listen to music. That DRM is just a false sense of security for the RIAA and really is unnecessary (see my previous post here)
I hope every DRM everywhere is broken. What are they going to do? Stop selling media?
Kiteboarding Gear Mention slashdot and get 10% off!
This is the first, and probably last, tech news that I found about on Google News first before Slashdot.
I said it the first time this was reported, I'll say it again. If you're going to engage in questionably legal practices and spend $0.99 / song, why not just buy the songs for pennies a piece from allofmp3.com? I use the site all the time, it's great. Anyone care to comment?
"What kind of music do pirates listen to?" -Paul Maud'dib
"Yeeeaaarrrrr n' Bee!!" -Stilgar, Leader of Sietch Tabr
that wouldn't be the case. After all it's not as if other sales channels (ie physical CD's from physical stores) are or ever have been magically immune to copying.
The key advantage to online sales is cutting out a lot of middle men and the convenience to customers that allows them to buy when the desire is there rather than having to go to a shop. IE they can reduce the cost of distributing their merchandise and increase it's accessibility and value to customers.
The labels are insane for buying into this DRM snake-oil. It will never be significantly effective and the degree to which it is defective inevitably makes the very product they are selling less valuable to the paying consumer.
On average I used to buy 3+ CDs a month. When they came out with "copy controlled" CDs that would not work with my Network Walkman (or laptop, or Xbox etc) I simply stopped buying any CDs thus afflicted (with the single exception of Radiohead's "Hail To The Thief" as I was seeing them in concert and thought it would be good to know the album properly beforehand). Fortunatly there are still some labels who haven't gone down this road but I am buying far less now.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
And Rosa Parks knew what she was getting into when she refused to give up her seat on the bus.
It is a sad day that a comparison is made between DRM and Rosa Parks.
Rosa Parks was a revolutionary in the sense that she made a bold statement against racism. Racism is an institution that evolved from slavery, the ownership of another human being. It was government sanctioned in the South and enforced by law. It treated individuals as second class citizens based on color. Lynch mobs killed black people for looking at whites the wrong way and justice turned a blind eye.
DRM has never killed a single person and I doubt it ever will.
I urge you to pay more respect to the dead in our history instead of trivializing them or their cause to be on the same level as free music. DRM is nothing...open up your eyes to the magnitude of the true evils of this world and the horrors that this piece of work called man can accomplish.
ed
No songs for Norway!
In other words, status quo.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Two-minute penalty.
So, don't attack my analogy, tell me why it was OK for him to lie to Apple and say that he WOULD respect their DRM and then turn around and crack it
Maybe he didn't read the click-through agreement? Or maybe he just doesn't like the inability to play the music on his non-iPod mp3 player even though he legally acquired the music and considers this fair-use (like using a VCR to record a movie) as long as doesn't redistribute the music to random people? Or maybe he understands the entire futility of trying to create an audio DRM system when the audio analog hole is currently (and probably forever) unpluggable so he doesn't see anything wrong with a digital hack compared to hooking speaker output into his line-in and pressing record? Or he could just like the challenge of being a hacker in both meanings of the word. Unless he is distributing the cracked music to others, I see no moral crime here even if he is violating laws.
--
Want a free iPod?
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof
This guy wants to show off.. big deal, as if its such a challenging thing to do. There are better chalenges to uptake my friend... nothing to see here, move along!
they're not part of the establishment. look, it's a free market economy. The fact is, when Apple started iTMS, there wasn't really much else like it around was there?
You could say they were testing the waters. Do you honestly think Apple wants to do what they've done by restricting the number of times playlists can be burned , and so forth?
Maybe you're right. Maybe they are part of the establishment. But how many people every day say they'd pay a buck for content? They gave it to you, but they gave it to you on their terms. And "They" may include Apple, but Apple is just the intermediary. They make it all possible, but just because their name is slapped on it doesn't mean that they are to blame.
If someone paid me to put together their music store for them, I'd do it in a heartbeat. If they pay me to put DRM in, I'll put it in. But I won't complain when Johnny JustAFront breaks it. I'll snicker behind my evil partner's back, but I do want them to keep paying me. So I'll release fixes.
Don't you think Apple is secretly laughing behind the MPAA and RIAA's backs? Because I sure do. How little faith you have.
-Ryan
Ehh.
It's just that "Jon" is, like, a 25% optimization over "John", with the same information content! (Maybe a 33.333% improvment, depending on your point of reference)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Microsoft?!?! Bullcrap! Wrong!
a y/ game_pages/crystal_quest.html
Sosumi was a sound resource stolen from a game released over a year earlier called "Crystal Quest" a game for system 6.
http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/the_fairw
The sound was stolen by apple and then renamed Sosumi and placed into System 7.
Facts are facts.
And dirty lies are sometimes trivial to prove. Any copy of Crystal Quest will show how correct I am.
Patrick Buckland never did sue apple over the sound effect. (He was the game author)
That game had lots of cool sound effects by the way.
The best was the sound for winning a level it was a comical "Ahhhhh!" sound.
March 22, 2005
Apple Computer Corp. (NASDAQ: APPL) today announced a lawsuit against one Jon Johansen, in which Apple alleges that Mr. Johansen has violated Apple intellectual property.
The lawsuit comes on the heels of attacks by Mr. Johansen on Apple's online music store, iTunes, in which Johansen allegedly removed a special technology called DRM from music downloads. "DRM is a technology applied to music downloads which enhances the value of a music download and facilitates consumer satisfaction with regards to it," stated a Microsoft spokeswoman yesterday. "By leveraging innovative technologies, content providers streamline compelling enterprise solutions."
Documents related to the lawsuit state that Apple did not want to take legal action against Mr. Johansen, but that Johansen asked Apple, and then begged and pleaded, to sue him. "Customer satisfaction is important to us," stated an Apple representative, "so we feel that the best way to satisfy the defendant in this case is to make him one."
Just kidding... Joking aside, and what's above is made up gibberish, not real press stuff... After buying my third Apple in 2004 and 2005, which follows years of disliking Apple computers due to the old OS, followed by years of trolling the Internet for information about OS X, I am considering investing in an iPod and getting on this iTunes thing. Heck, tcsh and my 1980's era UNIX programs look damn good on this slick, shiny Apple iron. They're doing a damn good job if you ask me... and hey, if you don't like DRM, buy a CD for cryin' out loud. Who cares, dude... people have to get paid for stuff when they work hard to get it on the Internet. Be considerate, and if you don't like that crap, vote against it with your dollars.
Most systems are mathematically sound, but there is always a flaw in the implementation that allows someone who is clever enough to sneak in. For example, SSH as a protocol and encryption system is secure, but some implmentations had a small flaw in them that allowed them to be cracked. All the headlines yelled "SSH broken" when the reality was that an implementation was broken. In this case, the DRM algorithm is secure (AFAIK) but the implementation is broken because the music is sent in the clear to the computer since the client needs to individually encrypt the music file with its own key. The only way to get around this flaw is to have the server encrypt it which would take a lot of CPU power (maybe grid computing of custom FPGA chips would help here) or to have the client run a TCPA system so that a 3rd party can't tweak the client. This sort of flaw is exactly why MS et al are pushing Trusted Computing.
However, this still won't stop the analog hole of plugging a wire into the output and input of the soundcard until the media is encrypted all the way to the speaker. At that point, the only way to get past this implementation would by to have a mike set up next to the speaker (or spliced between the analog amp and the magnet) and then filter the signal to try to get rid of the analog noise.
Hi, I submitted this story.
"The music industry is plagued by an enormous problem of legacy. Creativity has been stifled by the labels' continuing drive towards commercialization. We have "artists" like Gwen Stefani releasing cover after cover, first covering Talk Talk's It's My Life then covering If I Were A Rich Man from Fiddler on the Roof, and both covers are atrocious. "
I assume that you don't have it in your possession in any form then?
"These are examples of an industry which is creatively bankrupt and where profit is the bottom line. It seems like nowadays the only place you can find creativity is in underground music, before the industry has commercialized and destroyed it."
And how exactly does one "destroy" an idea?
"Music needs a new distribution model, one where the artist is in the driver's seat and has complete creative control over their work."
Are you telling me that musicians are born into a slave state? And isn't piracy a loss of "complete creative control over their work."
"The Internet has rendered traditional music labels obsolete, they're aware of this, and they're fighting their eventual downfall tooth and nail. They will lose."
Have you had a chance to compare the actual reality verses your idealized version of reality?
"DRM is based around cryptographically unsound principles. In order to play DRM encrypted music you need the encrypted content and the key on your local system. Given this you have everything you need to unlock the encrypted data, it's only through obfuscation in the client that the key is hidden."
And security is based upon absolutes.
"Eventually the industry will have to come to terms with this fact and the fact that their distribution model is antequated and obsolete. We need people to continue proving DRM is an unsound technology so eventually they give up on it entirely. "
And yet no one's who's brought up this argument, has actually demonstrated that their method is "better" (in all the ways better needs to be) compared to what already exists. Remember evolutuion demonstrates better, it doesn't spend days on slashdot talking about how good it is.
I do like Jon. Here is why.
Jon represents something increasingly rare: a resistance to the corporate ruled world. One must be quite blind no to see, how our life has been taken over ever faster, ever more painfully by multinational corporations.
Kafka's famous book, about a trial of a man who does not even know what is he accused of - is a pale comparison to reality what's going on at the outsourced justice island, off the US coasts.
Before you say, hey, that's the government... well, I think it's the corporations who make fortunes by corrupting governments, politicians.
1984 has quietly arrived, of course, in the name of our own security. We are fed by food that make us sick, so that we can support the drug and "healthcare" industry.
You must be really blind not too feel at least, that the dice is loaded. Tell me what is there to protect you, your livelihood, your health for sleezy multinational corporations which will sell you out, sacrifice you for making a buck.
As a cowboy, you of course might belive that it's up to you, if you are smart enough, you can be the exception. Very well... but statistically the number of cowboys around the world is continue to decline. And don't fool yourself - if you don't raise the eyebrows at least of some corporate lawyers, you are harmless slave already. You just don't matter. You are not even in the game.
Jon represents the desire to change or at least protest unregulated corporate rule. To some Jon represents knowledge to beat unregulated corporate power.
To me Jon represents the right to ask that why is the world going the way it is, who are benefiting from it and who are the loosers. Jon is forcing us to think for a moment and ask ourselves: are we happy? Are things going the way I really want them to go? If not - can I do anything to make a change?
Jon is not about some songs that mostly will be forgotten in a few years. Jon is about not to forget the question: who's rule is this anyway? Who authorized who to create this rule? Who's interest is protected by this rule by who's expense?
Jon's existence is the sign of vanishing freedom.
No wonder I like Jon - as much as I like my very own life.
Remember, DRM means Digital Restrictions Management, not Digital Rights Management.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
You teach them that lesson by not buying music that has DRM restrictions on it.
Lame. And by cracking this protection, labels will be even more paranoid that online music downloaders are only out to break copy restrictions in order to distribute content all over the net, making them seek even more draconian measures.
Tell me, what exactly is so wrong with the DRM of iTunes? I bet you've never even had a single issue with it. All I have to do is recreate my playlist and the CD burn count is reset again. This has to be the most lax DRM there is. And still people try to break it to support some fictional civil rights movement.
Maybe appropriately, maybe defiantly, prophetically, but I doubt there would be any irony *when* Apple lets fly the legal hammer of justice.
I don't think Gwen Stefani is the fault of legacy in the recording industries. Gwen always said she wanted to be rick and famous. And when she was poor and playing small groups in clubs and fairgrounds, it was cute, sad... she said she wanted to be one of those annoying and famous people with her name and lights, but she basically lived out of the back of a van playing crappy gigs in traditional musician fashion. You had to empathize with her, because everyone knows musicians in that situation. And you have to admit, Tragic Kingdom had some original and interesting tracks on it.
But Gwen is now exactly who she wanted to be. She has become the rich, famous, self-centered girl she always was, only now she's actually rich and famous. That which allowed her fans to empathize with her, and her with her fans, is gone. And in it's place are terrible covers of If I Were a Rich Man (I didn't think It's My Life was that bad), and vaccuous cameos in Kid Rock videos. I don't think this happened because she lost control over her music, so much as the change in lifestyle which comes with money made her lose connection with her audience.
A similar problem struck Alanis Morisette. Radio overplay aside, Alanis had always composed music because she was unhappy. And her audience responded to this. Enough people responded, that soon she was rich, successful, and gave her the power to solve her problems and make herself happy. Which she did. And she lost the drive to make music. Eventually she found it again (she gives a great interview about this), but because she was no longer singing about being tortured, she lost the audience that had that connection with her.
Most artists don't survive the transition from poor no-name slob to rich superstar simply because they sing about their experiences, and their experiences go from things everyone can relate to, to experiences very few people on the planet have. What would Bill Gates sing about that any of us here would connect to? Compiler woes? Kobain was highly relatable up until the end simply because he suffered the entire time. Dr Dre still raps about the kids in the hood and yelling at his grandma on the front porch, despite the fact that he owns million dollar mansions and essentially lives like an investment banker for talent.
The point is that the problems with the music industry that you had pointed out are not so much with legacy, but money. Too much money and too much success will destroy pretty much any artist. Even overthrowing the big 5 wouldn't change that.
The ______ Agenda
Theres a reason for that c11 change
.25 every 3 months until hitting 10-15%
1. they know interest rates are going to go up
2. people will say "fug it" and walk away from their houses
3. house prices will fall
4. people will either live at parents house, or 'sneak' into mexico "oh the irony"
They dont want millions walking away from debt, they want pure slaves to debt to keep everyone busy to keep the rich in power.
Your only chance, is byte the bullet, leave usa, you can for $30000 buy a great mansion on the beach in western afrika, (escapeartist.com)
Sure its not USA, but if you have $$ and FedEX delivers to your city/town, then what more do you need really. Screw the education system etc.. everything can be thought yourself at 3x the speed without 1/2 the crap.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
And whatever ones i have forgotten, and those that will be created. I use FreeBSD, and I prefer not to use linux compatability. Can I have itunes too?
Not that I want it.
True. It's not Apple that insists on the Digital Restrictions Management, it's the labels. Until they realize that they're just masturbating (screwing themselves), they'll keep on requiring it.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I can imagine a similar program just allowing users to keep downloads of music obtained via the ability to sample music in iTunes.
That would be quite nefarious, in contrast to simple DRM removal. At least they're still paying for it.
Hrmmm... Simple to prove, huh? If that was the case, you'd think somebody would have mentioned it before, instead of a search on sosumi and "Crystal Quest" turning up a grand total of Jack and Shit.
(And it doesn't help your point when you keep posting the same thing over and over. Just once is enough, thanks.)
the so sue me is an old apple joke. this is slashdot, this is expected knowledge.
http://www.answers.com/topic/sosumi
No, really. DRM is Digital Restrictions Management.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Someone should mod parent up. This is true.
Very difficult game, incidentally.
I believe we have an RIAA bot in our midst
Sig cannot be found.
Try gpsd and gpsbabel. Or for that matter, use the ancient gd2, which still works even on the newest Garmin models.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I admit, the new tools make it easier & easier to create pleasant sounds - even G'ma can crank a sweet riff out of GarageBand, for one - but it's gonna take a little more than that to make music people will bother to search out. And make no mistake, in the future you described so glowingly there isn't going to be anybody doing promotion for all these new vanity bands. Unless you think these bands will all have l33t web ski11z to match their musical genius.
I'm sorry, but I just don't have the time or musical skills to be a resource for you, sunshine, even if I wanted to. And I bet there's a lot of folks like me, whose priorities don't include creating music for free^H^H^H^Hdownloaders.
What you really mean, I think, is that you think the music is costing you too much, and that when you get it directly from the musicians you won't have to pay so much ... because that's how it works right now.
What REALLY bugs me about DVDJon is this - he is fscking with a product which is darn near the best part of the current system. I fear this ill-advised meddling will only end up encouraging the **IA to stop using the Net for any kind of music delivery system. Are you so certain they can't make it harder to get music than it already is?
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I know this is a troll, but it raises two interesting points. (There's nothing wrong with a troll stimulating proper discussion, just a problem if it stimulates angry responses.)
A: Would the blacklist work? Of course there's a lot of pirates, but the RIAA can use their resources to enforce a blacklist at most record stores. The only problem is that it'll of course have a negative effect (loss of sales to pirates) for those who implement it, long before it has a positive one.
B: Why don't you just become a bookseller or something? When there's disruptive technology like the Internet and MP3s, the smartest thing to do is change your industry. It's only your problem if you can't maintain your old business paradigm.
Because, of course, the court cases that Jon went through (DMCA infringment involving DVD encryption) relate directly to DMA involved with iTunes. After all, DMCA is DMCA, right? Let's lump all the cases together.
Using this tool might be a problem with Apples ToS and whatnot, but creating the tool is purely a legal issue. And that issue has been clearly settled under norwegian law. There is currently no norwegian law prohibiting you from creating a tool to break any copyright protection mechanism. You have the right to access any "secret" key in your hardware or software. That is why he can do so with impunity. Apple could sue, but they would lose as the law stands today. The public prosecutor knows it and won't do it.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Actually, to make your analogy correct, you'd have to get paid for every song you *write* (since you don't actually make the copies, nor is it any physical work involved in doing so). After all, Frito-Lay doesn't get paid every time someone shares a bag of chips with others.
See, this is why analogies with the physical world are stupid to begin with.
This doesn't show any special "brilliance" on behalf of DVD Jon; indeed I'm surprised it took most of the day. Such a small project will always be able move faster than a corporation, and the work-around isn't such a wonder. What is interesting is how fast Apple was able to respond in the first place.
Moof.
IIRC, the same trick used to un-DRM music from Napster (i.e. Winamp and a well-known plug-in), will also allow you to convert WMA songs from Walmart online music store (at $0.88 a song) to mp3 for use on your MS unapproved portable mp3 player. Heck, you can probably use it for any music store selling WMA encoded songs.
Linux at home
We have "artists" like Gwen Stefani releasing cover after cover, first covering Talk Talk's It's My Life then covering If I Were A Rich Man from Fiddler on the Roof, and both covers are atrocious.
I like No Doubt and Gwen Stefani but I don't care for either cover. However "Rich Girl" is actually a cover of a minor Nineties dancehall hit of the same name by Louchie Lou and Michie One. I like the original "Rich Girl" quite a bit. Obviously it's derived from the song from Fiddler but I wouldn't call it a cover of it.
Actually new CDs are 16.99 to 19.99, check any store or even amazon. It's been a while since I've seen a new CD sold at $10.
Now, my interests have nothing to do with anything played on any commercial radiostation, but nonetheless. I checked out emusic.com because it was unrestricted mp3 files for legal, low-cost download. Mostly, I wanted to check out the service, I didn't think I'd actually -stay- a subscriber... but it turns out they have a lot of tracks that I actually want. And of course, I can do whatever I want with them. (I'm not supposed to redistribute them, of course, and I don't.)
Anyway, you might check it out.
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
If Apple is smart, they'll stop paying attention to Jon. Instead they'll quietly insert a verification into the stream that can only come from the authorized version of the Apple iTunes application. Something that changes randomly and can't be easily replicated except by using the legit client to make purchases. Failure to handshake won't be visible, just recorded. Instead of trying to block it at the source, they'll quietly monitor all the connections, watching for PyMusic connections, which won't won't know about the secret handshake. They'll mark any of those accounts as being in violation of TOS.
Once every thirty days or so, they'll shut down all the associated iTunes accounts that violate the TOS, because they know without the secret handshake that the user wasn't using the authorized application. Killing the account prevents the user from transferring any iTMS music that had DRM to new computers, and it prevents the user from redownloading songs if their disk crashes.
Sure, for 30 days you might get DRM stripped songs, but after that you'll have to set up a new account, with a new credit card. That sounds like a lot of work to skip the burn and re-rip.
Not true at all!
a y/ game_pages/crystal_quest.html
Sosumi PREDATES system 7,and predates powerpc "BHA" sagan, in fact it is from a system 6 3rd party video game apple stole it from !!!
If you read all the posts in the thread before commenting you would have learned that!
Poermac 75000 debut !?!? No!
The powerPC mac that shipped well after Sosumi debuted in system seven and years after Sosumi SHIPPED in "Crystal Quest" game for Mac !!!
Sosumi was a sound resource stolen from a game released over a year earlier called "Crystal Quest" a game for system 6.
http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/the_fairw
The sound was stolen by apple and then renamed Sosumi and placed into System 7.
Facts are facts.
And dirty lies are sometimes trivial to prove. Any copy of Crystal Quest will show how correct I am.
Patrick Buckland never did sue apple over the sound effect. (He was the game author)
That game had lots of cool sound effects by the way.
The best was the sound for winning a level it was a comical "Ahhhhh!" sound.
Why is it that 6 people posted five different fake origins of the Sosumi story tonight and I alone seem to know the damned truth? Sheesh! At least i TRIED to educate people this time. (six times no less). Someone else will have to carry the torch. I am getting tired of trying to correct all the misinformation and anon posters have a limit to how many factual corrections they can post in 24 hours (10 corrections maximum).
The only reason I am trying to educate people again and again is becasue NO ONE is reading the -1 posts and some fool keeps modding these facts down for no reason.
I don't understand why anyone in this community really cares that much about this mess in the first place. Since the iPod and other popular players support non-DRM formats like MP3, there's really no reason to give a damn. I don't use Apple's goofy formats or any other DRM-enabled format. I don't use iTunes music store. Most of the best music is freely available from independent bands that aren't whores for Clear Channel.
If I want to buy music, I buy the physical CD, which is still a better deal than using iTunes and I get a higher quality product with more content and less restrictions. I can rip the CD to non-DRM formats and bypass all this BS. So why should anybody really care? It seems like a no-brainer to merely avoid proprietary and restrictive technologies in the first place. iTunes isn't worth the effort to crack if you ask me.
Before the DeCSS case, it wasn't really clear. They thought they had a paragraph they could twist into applying, even though it was never designed for such a case.
They got struck down in court. Twice. Didn't even try to argue their case before the Supreme court. That is why they won't try prosecuting him over anything he does with Apple's DRM now.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
may i be the first to welcome out DRM cracking, I-Tunes cracking, college-aged wooden shoe wearing Norwegian overlords.
w edishchef.jpg
http://blog.fatbusinessman.com/blog-post-images/s
Bork Bork...
NOT TRUE!!!
a y/ game_pages/crystal_quest.html
The data on wiki is not correct at all.
Apple stole the sound effect from a system 6 3rd party video game entitled Crstal Quest.
Sosumi was a sound resource stolen from a game released over a year before system 7, called "Crystal Quest" a game for system 6.
http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/the_fairw
The sound was stolen by apple and then renamed Sosumi and placed into System 7. (and possibly 6.0.7 sound manager update)
Facts are facts.
And dirty lies are sometimes trivial to prove. Any copy of Crystal Quest will show how correct I am.
Patrick Buckland never did sue apple over the sound effect. (He was the game author)
That game had lots of cool sound effects by the way.
The best was the sound for winning a level it was a comical "Ahhhhh!" sound.
We are all so used to faster than realtime copy mechanisms.
There's no way to totally prevent you from "reproducing" an A/V stream as long as there are devices that record audio and/or video. Even back as far as the first Mpeg2 encoders I used I remember having to suck the audio in directly from a playing CD to the input port on my sound card.
Even today the most common method of reproducing movies in theatres is video taping the movie screen... nicely and primatively circumvents most copy protection methods today (except for the yellow dot trick.)
This is just preventing consumer fair use, hobbyists and pirates alike will always find a way through these stupid hoops.
See, you're making the claim, therefore it's up to you to provide the evidence if you want people to take you seriously. And no, 'Get a copy of Crystal Quest' does not constitute convincing evidence. Convincing evidence would involve more info, like where to listen for the sound, documents stating the same thing, etc. This is especially true if there is no other evidence currently available that supports your claim.
Also, on another topic, getting modded down:
Here's a hint: there's no grand conspiracy to silence you. Post the same thing, over and over again, and you will get modded down to redundant, regardless of what you are posting. There's a reason all but one (the key phrase here) of your posts were modded down. You added no new information with each post, you just copy and pasted the same damn thing, over and over again.
(Why am I even wasting time arguing with an obvious troll?)
So is that all there is to OSS? If you don't like what someone else creates you blackmail them to support your platform of choice?
No need to create anything new, or which inspires ordinary people to switch. Just complain that somebody else doesn't want to play with you, and break their toys.
Thanks DVD Jon for showing the world what it's all about.
Go back to CDs which aren't copy protected at all (not in any real sense at least, to maintain compatibility)? Cut the biggest online store off the market? I don't think so. It'll only lead to a huge backclash. Apple just needs to pay lip service. Throw in a couple MSish quotes about "being targeted more because we're so popular" and such to keep WMA DRM in their place, and they are a-ok.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Allofmp3 encodes the MP3s for you from source and they're a relatively small time operation. Surely adding the DRM to already encoded music (based on my limited understanding of FairPlay) is less intensive than the MP3 encoding process? Bearing in mind it only takes a fairly humble machine to decode AAC music, and thus become an iTMS customer, it would be too much to expect users to surrender their PC for the duration of the download.
Not having bought anything from iTMS I can't comment directly on the process but has anyone experienced processing spikes when downloading tracks?
Dude, I think you posted this in the wrong story. This has nothing to do with not buying music. The DRM is bypassed AFTER you buy the song. Sorry but you might want to try your troll on another story.
FYI, it stand for You Have Been Trolled, You Have Lost, Have A Nice Day. But anyway what you posted was a reasonable and intelligent response, exactly what we need here on slashdot.
Prior to the iTunes 4.7.x breakage (I don't mean the recent breakage, I mean the anti-Hymn breakage), Hymn would leave all identification info in any files it unprotected. In essence, the files were (lightly) watermarked.
With iTunes 4.7, Apple changed it so that watermarked but unprotected files wouldn't play.
The solution? Remove the watermark.
By breaking the ability to use iTunes music fairly (for example, in a device other than an iPid), Apple essentially forced the authors of Hymn to make their software more suitable to piracy.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
More accurate version of "good-bad-good-bad".
Some engineers in Apple are good.
Some engineers in Apple are bad.
There are significantly more good people contributing to Linux than good engineers in Apple.
Also, Steve Jobs is definitely very bad. Maybe even evil. In most cases at least as evil as Bill Gates, albeit not easily seen due to the difference in market share.
Penny Arcade is not evil, but overrated and too way way way too unoriginal (as there is a humongous pool of Japanese fan comic like these) and adolescent (adults don't play games except in Japan).
This is great. I think that Apple should just offer him a job porting the software to linux. He would also be able to perfect the drm better than apple currently can. This whole thing would have never happened if Apple had decided to support linux as well as windows and mac os. After all there are more linux users that mac os users (all version of mac os combined). What is Apple gonna do now? Sue the guy for ruining the perfectly crappy business?
Anyone got a mirror for the program or the blog entry?
The fact that this guy (and maby his associates) are motivated to modify facistly made programs shows that "the homebrew" programming underground is still alive and kicking. EULA is a joke, reverse engineering is not all that bad. People pay god money for applications why shouldn't they, modify them.
EDIT the STATE, EDIT the EULA, and DELETE THE RIAA!!!!!!
Ohh my spleen
Maybe it's because people get annoyed when you post your "correction" OVER FIVE TIMES!!!!
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
...our new insta-cracking overlords.
Second this is not hacking a file on your system. This is using false information and your secure password to connect to a external network and download something you don't have a legal right to (since you know you violating the TOS the fact that your getting billed doesn't make it legal)
Using limewire bittorrent or edonkey may be a copyright violation but using this program could very well be viewed in legal terms as computer fraud. Is a DRM free file worth a FEDERAL FELONY to you!!!!!
This action may very well put DVD Jon in jail this time!!!!
I'm probably not the first to wonder, if maybe Apple is doing this on purpose to encourage folks to hurry up and buy tunes now while the DRM is off (since Apple is known to be anti-DRM).
Sharing has nothing to do with DRM its just the features of iTunes. The only real changes Apple has made is to expand the rights of its customers boosting the number of authorized computers from 3 to 5. there is no limit to the number of cds you can burn (only the number of cds at a time ...per playlist) ITMS files have never been sharable to nonauthorized computers
I thought it was "You Have Been Taken." Oops. I fail it! ;)
Guess which link is one of the ones that's NOT mirrored and goes directly to the original site?
The only link that's mirrored is the original story on a major news site that's more than capable of sustaining a Slashdotting.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
You really need both a life, and a clue. If you manage to graduate high school and the repeated beatings, you might start to get it.
New releases at Best Buy and Target are often $10 to $13 the first week.
When you're listening some song you purchased on your Linux box (despite Apples attempts to remove your fair use rights) you are *not* violating copyright law. You're just working around (De-DRM) a workaround (DRM) on the copyright law.
How is something that has been granted special protection (DRM systems) a workaround of copyright law? Now I can see several arguments that the law is a) bought and paid for b) internally inconsistent c) wrong d) unconstitutional, by creating perpetual copyright or e) all of the above, but it is still the law.
Like it or not, the intent of the DMCA was to grant DRM systems the protection they have. It is not a workaround of copyright law, it now is copyright law. You might say it is a workaround from the rights of earlier copyright law, but that is not the same.
I'm sorry but you're wrong. It has been made illegal. And to make it legal again, the law must change. Otherwise your "workaround of the workaround" is just a personal justification with no legal basis.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This is nonsensical. Most people that hate GPL violators, hate them because the GPL violators are performing the same act as the DRR (Digital Rights Restriction) groups are doing.
.Net). Ya know, if someone was accessing my service/app from something other than what I intended, I'd be pissed! And if they kept fucking with it, then screw them, the gloves come off.
.99 anymore! It'll be worse - like $2 a song or fucking DVDs that cost $20 or some crap like it was before!
C'mon man, there is a CLEAR difference to those tech companies that pilfer the code and fucking Apple who sells its OWN service! Remember, they made iTMS and didn't lift code from RhythmBox or X11Amp or whatever - they fucking made their own deal.
I agree copyright laws are fucked and I don't care for DRM just as much as the next guy. But, hell, just buy the song and fucking run JHymn on it for christsake! It's even cross platform, imagine that (no, I'm not talking about f-ing Mono or
And that's the point of this - DVD Jon is using an unauthorized client - NO purposefully making one. Why not fuck with Walmart or M$ or Napster or Real?! Why Apple?! I mean, they're the only company out of the bunch (cept Real Helix) that actually gives back to the cause and is acutally making some sort of difference in a way that makes people happy?! I'm no zealot or apologist or whatever and I know they're not perfect and f-all big companies, but still, this is like shooting oneself in the foot!
You guys that are all cheerleading for Jon are gonna get the REAL assholes pissed off - the record companies - and then they're gonna pull something and then I and others won't be able to even get songs for
I believe in the whole society and submitting art and shit like that, but after reading some of these posts - it's ridiculous! No bones against Jon, but fuckin-eh, I DO NOT want to have the Microsft or Walmart music stores the only digital games in town. Think about it!! In this case it is the lesser of the evils.
I'm glad you like your comfortable leash.
The Yahoo story is full of incorrect information. Engadget did a good job of pointing it all out.
If this was MS, people would be flaming the four corners of the world demanding to know how MS could have let a patched release be circumvented within a day of it's release! So, apple is secure, eh? I think not!
So is that four million tumtums he's at, or five? Things haven't changed that much since Bitter Bierce was around.... except maybe that there's a lot more people with pockets.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Not that I'm aware of but I have played it under OSX using vMac! Not quite as fun as the original -- it goes too damn fast -- but still brings back the old memories....
Actually, it used to be Internet, these days most organizations use internet. Check a few websites, style sheets, etc. Times have changed.
Despite all the talk about how all DRM can be broken, windows media drm doesn't seem to be cracked. What does Microsoft's DRM have that Apple's doesn't? There are stories about WM10 DRM being cracked, but I've seen no proof.
Would I work on strong DRM for a seven figure salary? Yus! :)
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
You have Rip, Mix, Burn (which you can do as long as you have CD's) confused with Download, Mix, Burn - which you can actually do TEN times. Except that it's really unlimited because the limit is on a playlist, not per song!
Tell my why, when it is so technically simple to do so, iTunes does not store a burn count on a single song. That doesn't seem to help the bottom line any.
Maybe, just maybe, some businesses actually do care a little about the customers - you know, the ones you have to constantly convince to give you more money? That's hard to do when they are all angry at you because you keep chipping away at what they can do and throwing arbitratry roadblocks at them.
people like you simply do not get business. It's far more than just money, it's SUSTAINABLE cash. Any business that wants to last longer than it takes to pull away from the curb in the pickup has to give people what they want in order to get money from them in a cycle. So the truly smart run businesses understanding they are there to serve you, not control you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Some people never learn.
I don't know if it occurred to you that perhaps that type of music isn't in style anymore, and people don't want to buy it? Couldn't have possibly crossed your mind? Because what you're talking about sounds like the shit that I (or almost anyone I know for that matter) would never listen to.
Oh God no...you've gotta be a troll right? Because that just made me laugh.
Digital Rights Movement.
Basically the worst they can do is claim a TOS violation and not let him (or anyone using standalone clients) use the server.
You can't sue someone for connecting to a public server, especially if the intent of use is perfectly legal. You pay for a song, then what does it matter how it is transferred?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://taptrance.tripod.com/pymusique-0.4.tar.gz
Just to correct a misconception.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Using this hack will allow me to listen to music I paid for on the digital music player of my choice.
Imagine that.
"If it's real, then it gets more interesting the closer you examine it. If it's not real, just the opposite is true." -
Presumably, Microsoft doesn't add the encryption in the client the way Apple does.
Moreover, and this is nearly as bad as the practical difficulties of dealing with "secure" hardware the user has complete access to, it's designed by a company with a timetable and a budget.
The best minds in the world fuck up cryptography and security when they have decades of time to work and peer all the review they can handle.
Along comes a company that wants to do DRM. They could do use a very strong cipher but the chip that does that costs $0.05 instead of $0.03. They could open it up to peer review but they want it secret and they want it by the end of next quarter. They could have the code audited for security but that would take an expensive consultant.
Whoops. Now the cipher can be brute-forced a few years down the road. Whoops, their implementation drops bits of the key when the user does a chosen-plaintext attack. Whoops, there's a buffer overflow in in the firmware of the DRM chip. Now it can be reprogrammed to dump the unencrypted audio stream onto the hard drive.
Big business is never going to change the way it thinks. Their decisions will be based on what will give them good margins this quarter and next, not what will keep them secure for years to come. DRM is in a terrible position because it has to go in consumer electronics, where these pressures are at their worst.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
So in response to this apple will need to take the next step to protect the copyright of the music.
Up until now Apple has had the least restrictive DRM available, but step by step it will get more restrictive.
Perhaps the next step, apple will have to put the DRM on before it sends the file?
Well there's still the burn it to a music CD then rip it back right? At least until the copyright holders tell apple "Don't let them burn music CDs or you get no music".
finally an honest dupe!
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
Choose your battles. Don't start an arms race until you have to. We wouldn't want HD-DVD/Blu-Ray/whatever to have DRM thats too good. Let 'em release some lame shit like CSS...
Rip, mix, burn is what you do to a CD. Get it stright. :)
And as someone else commented, it's not limited to 5 times.
That SHOULD be all the nudge-nudge-wink-wink you need, sheesh.
Steve J.: What happen ? ....
iTune Dept: Somebody set up us the PyMusique
iTune Dept: We get signal.
Steve J.: What !
iTune Dept: DVD Jon website turn on.
Steve J.: It's you !!
DVD Jon: How are you gentlemen !!
DVD Jon: All your iTune are belong to us.
DVD Jon: You are on the way to bankruptcy.
Steve J.: What you say !!
DVD Jon: You have no chance to survive make your time.
DVD Jon: Ha Ha Ha Ha
iTune Dept: Captain !!*
Steve J.: Break out every 'LandSharks'!!
Steve J.: You know what you doing.
Steve J.: File suit.
Steve J.: For great PROFIT.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
1000's of 13 year olds with bad taste in music. i say let them sit next to the grevious bodily harm defendants for a few hours, that'll soon change their mind about breaking the law
One solution would be to supply the Sorenson codec as a wrapper under Wine. No, don't laugh, Windows-only codecs for XMMS have been handled under Linux like that before. VQF was handled that way, I believe.
Of course, OS X uses a BSD core, so it should be possible to just write a module to work with one of the IBCS kernel plugins to run the code directly. No porting or modifying required, then.
Oh, there are options. The probolem is not a technical one. It may be, as you say, that they just don't want to do it, but that is not because they can't. It would be purely because they have chosen not to.
The best reason I can think of is that Linux users tend to be skeptical of DRM and are generally a lot more clueful than Windows users on the technical front. As a result, flaws are more likely to be found and openly exploited under Linux.
It is not that the benefits themselves need be lower (though that's possibly the case), but rather the risk:benefit ratio is less favourable. The net gain for Apple is that ratio, not the direct profit.
Besides, with Apple's DRM broken repeatedly, there is a question of whether Apple's coders have the skills to maintain what they already have...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Good thing for Microsoft-based services that they have such a tiny market share otherwise these hackers would be going after them.
The Apple near-monopoly market share are making them vulnerable...
Wow, it's like an episode of "Sliders"...
Basically Jon get's some limelight and for a very short while Apple are beaten. Meanwhile people who actually like and use iTunes legitimately find that Apple has to restrict the service more and more. And so Jon is screwing it up for everyone else.
As some one who works in an industry where DRM and encryption is a fact of life I know that it's a balance between complexity and the *appearance* of security. Basically you make it difficult for the average joe to crack the system, complex enough to satisfy the media supplies, but simple enough to make it cost effective. It's a status quo that is fine as long as no one breaks it, or at least only a very few break it.
Jon is breaking that status quo and to achieve what? Not success as Apple just plugs the gaps. The only solution can be short term fame and self gratification. He's a twat!
It's an old troll, yes. I've seen it on many related slashdot posts before.
I think he's wrong about the EUCD not applying - well technically, it won't apply probably anyway because he is Norwegian, but I assume there is some equivalent law.
The EUCD protects '... any technology, device or component that, in the normal course of its operation, is designed to prevent or restrict acts, in respect of works or other [protected] subject matter, which are not authorized by the rightholder.' To me, this covers also a distributed a setup like the iTMS, where parts of the protection are in the server, parts are in the client. PyMusic is a classical circumvention device because it circumvents the client. It doesn't matter that there is no protection between client and server, because in the 'normal cause of operation' it is not intended that you go in between client and server. It would probably be a different story if you were mailed the plain content, and then would need to manually import it into iTunes for protection.
But she can sure SHAKE HER ASS, can't she?
The PyMusique software definitely needs some automatic update feature. People need to be alerted of new interoperability threats when Apple changes its protocols, and when a new workaround patch is available.
Otherwise people may pay Apple for unusable music files. Well, selling something that has been intentionally made unusable should be illegal anyhow.
Porting Quicktime would be a lot of extra work on top of the special UI things they already do when they port programs. They could use a media framework that is already present on Linux, but I doubt [it]
You overestimate the porting effort. Quicktime's backend was designed to be crossplatform to begin with.
The UI was also designed to be crossplatform. The QT UI does not use Win32 directly and it does not depend on MFC. The QT UI is well abstracted and designed for portability.
I think the biggest reason Apple has not ported QT to Linux is because:
*) there is no money in it for them
*) Supporting various Linux distros with a binary-only release...
There's money in iTunes, but not enough margin to justify porting QT to Linux, even though it may be an EASY port. Like you said, not economically sound. Technically however, most of the portability problems are worked out of the code.
QT and iTunes will happen on Linux when someone like Novell or Linspire pays Apple for a version.
I would love any of these pontificating constitutional lawyer wannabees to try to convince me that if they were allowed to *Re-sell* thier music under a no-drm model they would actually delete the origianl copy from thier hard-drives. Unlikely. All I hear is nonsense moralising backed up by nothing more than a greedy desire to have as much music as possible without paying for it.
Yeah Yeah you say that you would still pay for stuff on ITunes if it were not DRM'd but I doubt it. If you could get that latest Kylie Minouge hot number from your buddy for nix then you would.
When will slashdot cease being a platform for music pirates to whinge.... grrrrr
The bikini - security through obscurity since 1943
It's Dyslexic
Oh, but mjh49746, don't you know that piracy is everybody's problem? No, it's not my problem for the simple fact that I don't buy CDs from the Scumbag 5. I refuse to help them, nor will I have their dirty files on my hard drive - let alone 'share' them. It's either indies without DRM, or no deal.
Now as for DVD Jon, I personally don't think he's helping matters all that much in the short term, but in the end, him and others like him will eventually drive home the point that DRM is stupid, immoral, and a very expensive test of futility. Besides, this is a full blown 'war' for digital freedom. There's no high or low road to take here. It's 'win at all costs'! The **AA are going to do everything they can do to subvert Copyright Law and reverse the Betamax Decision. This is no joke, people. If the RIAA wins and that cocksucker Orrin Hatch has his way, we're all going to learn first hand exactly what draconian corporate oppression really means.
You obviously don't understand the argument. This isn't about whether or not DRM is 'okay'. DRM is fundamentally flawed. It is impossible. You might as well be asking for reverse friction to propel your car instead of those evil fossil fuels.
Has it ever occurred to you that if you consider the entire industry and its artists creatively bankrupt that you don't have to patronize it in any way, shape, or form?
Yep. See iRate and CD Baby for more information.
After all, it's the commercial tripe that's on the iTunes Music Store anyway, right?
Wrong again. Meet Brad. Brad is an unsigned, open source musician. All his files are available for free download at his website. Not just the tunes, but source files too. You are encouraged by Brad to download his music and source to remix and share with friends in just about any fashion possible. Not only does Brad lack the RIAA's bad attitude, but Brad has talent. Brad's tunes are also available on iTunes for $0.99 each.
If it's so horrible, it seems that you shouldn't have any problems not using the iTunes Music Store, eh?
You'd rather downloaders go "steal" music rather than pay for the song? You aren't defending artists. You're defending RIAA policy.
The court case clearly showed that DeCSS was legal. In fact, in the new draconian DMCA-like copyright law soon to be introduced in Sweden as a result of a EU directive it's STILL legal. Why? Because CSS is a region-protection format, NOT a copyright protection format. It's a tool to prevent direct importing of DVD movies, and thus is a violation of basic principles of free trade.
There actually *is* civilization in Europe!
I cannot believe i have to keep trying to post this because not one person sems to EVER read any of my posts and despite some people agreeing and others asking to mod it up, it keeps getting modded down by fucktards taht cannot face reality of the TRUE origins of the Crystal Quest sound effect apple stole and labeled "sosumi" and released as user selectable alaert sound in a version of System 7.
a y/ game_pages/crystal_quest.html
The Beatles origin, the Sagan Origin, all are wrong.
Sosumi PREDATES system 7, in fact it is from a system 6 3rd aprty video game apple stole it from !!!
If people botherred to read all the posts in the thread before commenting they would have learned that!
The powerPC mac that shipped well after Sosumi debuted in system seven and years after Sosumi SHIPPED in "Crystal Quest" game for Mac !!!
Sosumi was a sound resource stolen from a game released over a year earlier called "Crystal Quest" a game for system 6.
http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/the_fairw
Facts are facts.
And dirty lies are sometimes trivial to prove. Any copy of Crystal Quest will show how correct I am.
Patrick Buckland never did sue apple over the sound effect. (He was the game author)
That game had lots of cool sound effects by the way.
The best was the sound for winning a level it was a comical "Ahhhhh!" sound.
No one moderates informative posts like mine if they point out people being wrong. And worse... i tried tirelessly and continually to educate people here as the the FACTUAL and provable origin of the sound taken from Crystal Quest.
Go ahead look at this moment RIGHT NOW as i post this at 3:30am EST, not one person seems to have ever modded up or looked at or tried to disprove my factual origin as to the Sosumi sound.
This proves everyone here is ignorant and that moderation on slashdot is nothing more than a tool used by ignorant fools to stifle free speech and corrections to herd group think. (pro mac posts, anti linux, pro microsoft, pro mpaa copyright, etc are all routinesly modded down by zealot fanboy kooks)
Well I for on an preserving a copy of this thread for posterity to show once and for all my experiment that proves that fools on slashdot NEVER correctly moderate FACTUAL posts.
HA!
Unbelievable.
I will have to put up a web site and list the offsets into the goddamned resources of Crystal Quest and System Seven resource fork I guess. Why bother though. Ignorant fools like wandering in circles never getting the joke of apple naming it "sosumi" after stealing the sound.
idiots. clueless fucktards.
No one cares about factual history ever it seems.
"[O]nline digital music is the inevitable future, and I don't see why anyone would want to hurt that."
It's not a question of wanting to "hurt" it, but of wanting digital distribution on the same liberal terms under which (most) CDs are already available. Anything less is a retrograde step.
I went into a record shop specifically to buy Velvet Revolver's CD. I actually had it in my hand, ready to pay, when I noticed the vague compatibility warnings on the back, threatening that it might not work in my equipment.
I put it back on the shelf. Why would I want to pay money for that? I wonder how many others did the same, and turned to alt.binaries.* for a copy that they could actually listen to.
For me, the online music stores are the same dodgy deal. Each will only play on a subset of the devices I own, and carries the threat that my listening freedom may be restricted further in the future at the arbitrary whim of a content provider (c.f. iTunes' ever-changing streaming/licensing regime.)
Digital distribution has a lot to recommend it. It saves energy, time, and money - not to mention carbon. But we don't have to give up the freedoms we already have in order to get digital music. The industry is using the transition as a useful excuse to foist extra restrictions on us. Resist them now, or regret it later.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
It may have more to do with your tone than what you actually have to say. Just a guess.
or Hymen?
They have oil as well! (Don't tell GWB)
Timo's Audio Software http://www.esseraudio.com
AFAIK, he's in Norway.
In Norway, EULAs mean both diddly and squat.
If he pressed {accept} to any EULA, it also meant diddly and squat.
He made no promises to Apple.
No agreement was broken.
Now may we attack the anology?
Go on ya legend!
Seriously though, fair play to the guy, without people like him OSS wouldnt be where it is today.
"Allofmp3 encodes the MP3s for you from source and they're a relatively small time operation."
I could be wrong, but I don't think that it necessarily translates to a high load. I assume that AllOfMP3 store the encoded MP3s once they have been created. I'd be very surprised if they didn't.
I would also wager that the majority of their downloads consists of a small number of albums. That means that most downloads will simply be pre-prepared data. They can offer the value-added custom encoding service to the minority that want it at little additional cost to themselves.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
To elaborate on this, the 'precedent' system in which past rulings form a legal ground for deciding future cases is part of common law, which as the link indicates is generally found in English speaking countries.
The rest of Europe, including Norway, basically uses civil law, in which in the end only the written law counts.
If a copyrightable work is protected under DRM it is not restricted by copyrights.
The reasoning for this is
1) The DRM will stop copying that is not authorised
2) The DRM restricts more than copyrights allow
If the DRM happens to be broken, then the resulting file is open of copyrights.
Include software in this scheme.
The DMCA is a US law. The DMCA doesn't mean squat in Norway, which is another country in another part of the world (Europe actually). Between Norway and the US there is a big lake. Is it starting to come back to you now?
To sum up, even if you yanks want US law to be global law, it isn't. If push comes to shove, we will defeat you. We fight for real freedom, you fight for dollars.
in the case whether or not they can subpoena the websites who published what Apple considered trade secrets Apple's lawyers have indeed beated EFF lawyers if memory serves correctly.
In the US media at least it seems that it took months of pressure to get the Norwegians to knuckle under and prosecute Jon despite no laws being on the books either in Norway or the EU prohibiting DeCSS or things like it. The US media, did however spout off a lot about it being a violation of the EUCD (Europe's DMCA) despite the fact that at the time of the articles the EUCD was not law, nor is Norway a subject of the EU.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I respect totally DVD jon, for the work he does, and concerning the DVD, as everybody compare this to it, DVD is the only format available, you have no choice, so DECSS is a tool to force DVD to be played in Linux, because nobody cares. Concerning iTMS, I still see CDs in shops, and even LPs. If I see a Copy protected CDs, I don't buy it, I search for the LP, I think this is more powerful than just buying the CD and cracking the protection, because cracking the protection doesn't make it go away, while not buying can, if people really cared. So just don't say your fooled, when you buy, you submit to a contract, if you don't like it just don't buy it, There is enough free music out there, non copy protected cd, and vinyl to make every minutes of every days of you life covered by music, so stop whining. On the other hand, Apple should offer a client for Linux, or indicates that itunes is not free, but cost the price of a windows or mac os licence, because that is what it is, it is using a product to force you to choose another one in a pool of option (if you choose itunes, you have to choose mac os or windows, which is as such an abuse since it forces your choice to a more expensive alternative)
When technically oriented people who understand what's at stake just don't care because they think Apple's brand of DRM "isn't so bad", then we hae a problem.
Because the dividing line between acceptable and not-acceptable has moved from "No DRM" to "DRM as long as I personally aren't inconvenienced", then we have a problem. Because that line will never move back to "no DRM". The restrictions will grow worse and with each passing year, people will sipmly accept a few new restrictions because "its not so bad" and "well, the record companies/Hollywood have to protect themselves".
Its surprising how much crap people will put up with as long as their shiny iPod works. They never even think to next week, much less next year.
hell yeah, more power to you.
lets show them why they shouldn't ever try and make a business model succeed! Lets show them that all digital users reject the idea of obeying any kind of license. woooo!
that's sarcasm by the way. If you want to ruin the party, do it in your own back yard, not ours. (the people who actually pay for songs / respect the fact that they are -allowing us- to participate in this, and that its not some diety-given right to get music a la carte.
" they're not part of the establishment."
No...selling Brittany Spears music with DRM is so anti-establishment. Its like the 60's all over again!
"WMAs rock Mp3s"
They sound about the same, but WMA's don't play on all players. Plus, with players that cost more than $50, space is hardly the issue these days.
Which makes them a bad deal.
Here's the formats of choice, in order of preference:
1) Full CD quality (.WAV)
2) APE/FLAC
3) MP3 (192kb/s or higher)
4) AAC (standard format, no Fairplay)
------------ACCEPTABLE----------------
5) WMA - no DRM
6) RM - no DRM
7) AAP
8) WMA
9) AAP
As you can see, WMA falls below the line of acceptability for people who know and care about audio.
Music always was a shared cultural heritage of all people in a community.
Musicians made a living performing, writing music for others (sponsored by rich patrons like the church, the nobility, the burgoise or the State in communist countries), it was common practice to freely took music by another composer and use it in your own compositions ("variations over a theme of..." are legion in the classical music world).
The recording industry is trying to steal away our cultural heritage, and here you are, justifying them.
What a moron.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I hate giant companies like M$ and RIAA, for me it reminds me on middle ages when the kings around Europe was terrorising the people. I hope that EU is not accepting those paten rules, if EU does it can only mean thing, that those bureaucrats in Brussel are NOT listing to the people. But anyway this also applies for Apple too, I think they are getting a little too big. (and inpolite)
Boy, aren't you a hero!!
"Look guys, I cracked Timothy's login-password again!!" Yep, YOU surely could appreciate THAT, couldn't you!!
Jerry Smith
Let me say I think that Apple has every right, the RIAA has every right, the MPAA has every right to use every technical means at their disposal to protect their copyright.
Where I draw the line is that I don't think the FBI should be the enforcement arm to protect these technical means of protection.
In essence, what I'm saying is this...if people are commercially copying this stuff, the FBI should get involved, because it is related to the actual copyright law.
However, if Apple uses Fairplay, and people use a program that negates Fairplay, then Apple should have two options...ignore it, or stop selling it to me. In my opinion, this puts market forces into effect:
1) Apple either stops selling music (or the RIAA or whomever)
2) Apple lowers prices to make their songs more appealing with DRM
3) They accept that no system is perfect and get on with business
3) They removed the DRM
But these people want to be protected from the market forces that ultimately make a DRM'd song worth less than a non-DRM'd song and that is *annoying* to businesses. They want to have their cake and eat it too. I'd like that as well, but I don't get the benefit of congress and the FBI to help me out.
I agree, don't buy from iTMS...I think the quality is average, and the prices too high by a factor of 2-3. But I understand it is *reasonable* to buy from iTMS and expect to use the song anywhere I want as long as I don't violate the copyright.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
As are most people willing to live in a DRM world.
First of all Jon is just doing in the open something that otherwise would be done underground. If I was Apple I would hire him as a consultant, and the day I would get a DRM system that Jon could not brake then I would parade it as the mother of all the DRMs solutions.
But of course that would still be missing the point.
Music is nothing but soundwaves. Apple and its unwilling business partners in the recording industry are trying to build a multibillion dollar business selling you, er, air soundwaves.
Humanity for millenia knew that such an idea was silly in extreme, and only the most retrograde of institutions (extremist religions, dictatorial goverments and the RIAA) have tried to curtail the freedom of the people to share a tune.
To be opossed to that is not an extreme position (heck, that you believe that shows how good the PR people working for the recording industry are, they are earning the shitloads of money they surely are being paid, that otherwise would go to artists, but I disgress...), it is just to want to go back to what always was: music as a shared social experience, where musicians *earned* a living getting our there and performing or composing, where patronage (by rich institutions or individuals) was the norm, and where sharing of musical ideas was the norm and even an incipient form of journalism (look for trovadours or mexican "corridos").
The music used to be ours, now us, and more worringly, the artists, have to be asking permission from the middleman to enjoy the music. That is wrong and as far as I am concerned we should do all what we can (legally, which Jon is doing) to oposse this stupid mentality.
If the RIAA members and their equivalents around the world would sit down and make a business plan about freely sharing music (idiots, they are the fucking gate keepers!) they would finish with illegal P2P in a blink.
But they are lazy, and that may be their undoing, sooner or later a majority of artists and new distributors will realize that the way forward is different.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
WM envryption is harder to crack, but more importantly, its not used very much, so there's little that's worth cracking at this point.
Besides, people already have effective hacks on windows where you capture the output of the sound card with a special sound driver. That's what Palladium is supposed ot prevent, but my guess is the delay in Longhorn will stretch until 2007 at least, and the installed base of XP will be with us for another 10 years (how many installs of Windows 98 are still out there? A lot).
Who is your employer?
.... does not apply to Norway.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
How about they don't. Overproduced clinically sterile music suck hard.
There's no way to prevent a client or server from talking the same wire protocol.
While I agree that there is no way to prevent a client or server from talking the same wire protocol, it is most certainly possible to prevent users from using it successfuly to bypass security. In the extreme, it is possible to make applications authenticate themselves as part of the protocol in a manner similar to Microsoft's suggested Trusted Computing Initiative.
I am no proponent of such nonsense, of course, because it would be abused to trample on our fair rights, force us to purchase media multiple times (when formats change, for instance) and in general make life more difficult. But it most definitely possible.
For those not familiar with this orwellian possibility, it comes down to this: Hardware, from the bios up, must authenticate itself and can sign data with keys that are not retrievable from hardware and therefore not spoofable. The kernel must be signed in a manner recognized by the hardware for the hardware to boot it. The OS libraries must be signed in a manner recognized by the kernel for the kernel to call into them. Applications must be signed in a manner recognized by the OS for the OS to run them. All unsigned libraries and applications may only be run in a sandbox without access to the hardware authoraization keys (and therefore unable to decrypt media, call into priviledged functions or establish trusted sessions with secure servers).
There are many degrees of paranoid trustmania that can be conceived of between where we are (no trust = wild wild west) and full lockdown (as described above). Do not, for an instant, believe that Apple will not open that toolchest if they need to in order to grow as a media distribution company.
Remember, the iPod could easily be used as a trust token if Apple wanted it to - meaning that until you plugged your iPod in, you couldn't download or decrypt songs (the iPod could serve as a pseudo-trust root)... This is just an example.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
I will wait until somebody with the music "people want"[tm] tries it seriously (i.e. no DRM bullshit, understanding that music is a commodity and what you add is a service of easy distribution and cataloging).
A company should put up a website with non DRMes content to which you could subscribe or by by the track. That would not give users the right to share electronically with unkonwn people, and the RIAA could continue their hooby of suing school children, grannies and the ocassional bulk file sharer.
DRM is a flawed technical means to try to remove your personal copy rights, which conveniently the recording industry is using to move us towards a pay per play scheme.
The amazing thing is to see how many sheep are singing the praises of this crappola while going to the butcher.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Keep thinking, pal. Don't stop until over $5 for a new release feel overpirced.
He live in Norway, US laws do not necessarily apply.
As for the EULAs, the jury is out there if they are legally enforceable, the impresion you give that they are binding is completely and holly misleading.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
First off, Christian rock sucks. Manson, from time to time, rocks. (Christ is okay but he's so unlike Christians.) That may be a part of your declining sales.
Secondly, fewer and fewer customers are entering your store to buy CDs because the costs of CDs have gone up during an economic downturn where OTHER electronic media are becoming cheaper and cheaper. Mass-market DVDs cost the same price as mass-market CDs - how is the price point not broken on this? You are losing money because you are paying too much wholesale for music, and because of that, you have to put your retail price points up way too high for people to buy them. This would be happening even without peer-to-peer.
Guess what, though. Peer-to-peer was helping you out, even if you didn't know it. From 1998-1999, didn't you have a great year? That was Napster. People were "trying before they buy" with Napster and becoming more informed consumers. They were also exposed to new artists and new music that isn't played on the radio, and went out and bought it.
But then the RIAA shut down Napster and started suing students - right when your business took a downturn, I'm guessing. Personally, I stopped buying RIAA CDs (which, let me guess, are just about all your store stocks.) I still buy music, but I buy it from places like www.cdbaby.com - indie music only. (And not Indie the style, but indie the business model.) Locally, I buy from places that stock local artists and local music - Encore and Waterloo in Austin.
Anyway... your plan to stop piracy is to prevent people who download music from buying music legitimately. Which means that instead of going with piracy as a model of "try before you buy," you're going to force them to go either to your competitors or to the Internet. Now, can you tell me why this won't work?
You may have felt morally justified in kicking out that "pirate," but the guy was just about to make a sale when you kicked him out. Not to mention the future purchases the kid would have made. Not to mention the kid's friends' who have now heard this story and have considered you - rightfully - an asshole and will not shop from you.
Finally, don't give me a sob story about your goddamn kids. You started a store based on one type of product from an industry dominated by a monopoly trust supplier. The monopoly trust is now screwing you over and screwing itself over. You didn't think to diversify your selection with DVDs, or with video games, or t-shirts or something so that you didn't have more than music to sell. Well, whoop de doo, I wonder why your kids have to have ragged haircuts. Maybe it's because your business model is horribly flawed.
From the "Christian Rock" to the "War on Drugs fought with skill" (ha) comments, to the way that you treat your customers, I'm willing to bet you voted for the Republicans last election cycle. If that's the case, I extend no pity when you try to declare bankruptcy and find out that you can't. I love small businesses but only when they treat people like customers rather than consumers - something you've long since forgotten.
Books are easily copied (copy machines, handwriting a copy, etc).
But they are still copyrighted material.
Digital music could be exactly the same, easily copiable, but that would not give people the right to make millions of copies.
DRM has a completely different agenda that is to rent you the music, or pay per play. I am amazed how many peoplr just don't see that simple fact and are not up in arms against any move in that direction.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You can do the same thing with DirecTiVo. TyTool has a built in MPEG editor that lets you mix GOP accurate cuts (no reencoding) and frame accurate cuts (reencodes a dozen or so frames per cut) as necessary.
Or, if you have the latest version of the TiVo software, you can download the shows, decrypt them on your PC with one of a few tools (including MS's own GraphEdit), and burn to DVD. That version isn't out for DirecTiVo, though.
here's a link to the google *text cache* of the blog (www.nanocrew.net/blog/ ). Yeah even the normal google cache is slow.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
And if they made you sign a contract giving yourself as their slave, that would be also enforceable for sure...
There are certain things that even if signed with blood, can't be legally binding.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Here.
Now that he's made his own iTunes client that doesn't add DRM, the next thing DVD Jon ought to turn his attention to is finding a way (if it's at all possible on the client side) to break the artificial regioning that exists in the iTunes Music Store. I'm in the UK, but I'd love to be able to buy tracks from the US or Japan or places like that. Seeing as how the record labels and suchlike don't seem to be inclined to let this happen any time soon, maybe DVD Jon could figure a way of doing it, unless it's all handled server-side.
To be honest, I've always wondered why they let you BROWSE other-country iTMS stores? I mean, what's the point? "Hey, here's a whole bunch of stuff that YOU CAN'T BUY! Sure, you can listen to previews and run searches and everything but we're not gonna let you buy the track! You'll just have to hope we added it to your own country's store, otherwise you're SOL!"
Are we overlooking the RIAA business model is a little more out of date than the drm he's killing on a daily basis? I'm all for dealing with the man :eye roll:, but until the RIAA is brought into the 21st century, or drm becomes more friendly (uh huh), this whole itunes, dvd jon etc are all moot.
... you get ahold of apple and tell them / show them the exploit.
He's doing this as the self-appointed saviour of linux users who want to use iTMS music.
But that's disingenuous because the linux users would have to buy the track with a legit version of iTunes first - for pay - with Mac or Windows - then redownload it under linux.
AND the people who are applauding this are chiefly the noisy ones who (1) claim they should not have to pay for music / **AA is evil / DRM is evil / and (2) won't use for-pay software / OS in the first place
Well, good for them - this sort of software is free-as-in-syphillis - you had to do something a little dirty to get it.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
"Racism is an institution that evolved from slavery,"
No it is not. Its a stupid statement. Racism is a form of tribalism which is innate in the human makeup.
Slavery was an economic and social system that has been around as long as human beings have been around.
However, people will enslave people of their own "race" (I don't understand what a "race" is, but that's irrelevant for now).
And people standing up against corporate takeover of our culture is equal to fighting racism. I see the two on the same moral plane absolutely.
Dude, you're looking to hollywood movies for social inspiration.
Geek.
...granting them an illegal end run around the constitutional limits of copyright terms.
What "constitutional limits?" Copyright in the U.S. is defined by the legal code, not the U.S. Constitution. Search the text of the constitution and the amendments for yourself. The word "copy" doesn't even show up once.
Its like iTune's coders or administration want music to be free or something, they seem to leave these gaping loopholes that a couple of programs circumvent, either that or maybe just DRM is just a bad idea, and it seems hard to implement, and frankly I think it is just bad for the industry too.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
"How on Earth do you figure they are locking out competition?"
I buy $1000 worth of iTMS music.
I get tired of iTunes.
I want to use MS's WMP.
Ummm...
Since when the price of anything gave you the right to steal/borrow it w/o the owner's consent?
Do you sneak into movie theaters from the backdoor just because you feel tickets are overpriced?
Assuming (and I wouldn't even dare to hazard whether this is or isn't so) it is illegal to acces iTunes with "unauthorized" software they'd need to have a log of _him_ connecting to the service. As for "breaching" his contract with iTunes, who says he actually engaged in one by making use of their services.
It's like someone built a very large wall with 1 door in it, offering a service to people who want to look at what's behind the wall and making those people use that door (i.e. Apple). Then someone else comes around, looks at the wall (or listens to stories of people describing the wall) and says: "Well, here is this periscope like contraption, that you can use to look over the wall if you should choose to."
But of course, IANAL.
Where you pay the bloke for the stuff you nicked.
"that they are -allowing us- to participate in this"
Yes, what an honor an privledge they're selling you medicore fidelity for high prices and restricted content.
My god, its like when mother theresa washes the feet of the poor.
Its beautiful. Its like a magical favor they've bestowed on us. Jesus/Allah/Buddah be praised. Its a religious thing. And DVD Jon is just messing with this gift. Its like he's spitting in the eye of god.
It hurts us all to the core when people pay apple $1/song and they refuse to understand that they should only do the things that apple has said its okay to do! What if Apple takes this magical gift away. God will be angry and we will lose our special, precious, magical iTMS gift.
Oh the horror! I could not go on!!!!
Try reading the Constitution yourself.
The U.S. Constitution says nothing about copyright. The string "copy" doesn't appear once, the word "work" only shows up about not compelling a type of labor by traitors, and "publish" is only used to require the legislators and treasury to publicize proceedings and financial statements.
Copyright in the U.S. is defined by the legal code, not the Constitution.
"Too much money and too much success will destroy pretty much any artist."
Until very recently, artists were allowed to grow and mature.
The Rolling Stones weren't a huge hit with their first album.
Aerosmith? Ha ha ha ha ha. Until "Toys", only metal heads heard of them.
Genesis was so far underground that people never heard of them until they put out 6 albums!
Some artists hit right away and do well for decades... Chicago, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Elvis Presley.
But I suspect we won't see those acts again. I mean, look at Chicago...a bunch of trumpets, trombones...man, the kids really like that guitar sound. The Rolling Stones were dangerous during their heyday.
The music industry used to take lots of risks, they were willing to be patient with good solid acts. And today, the big news is Gwen Stafani is still singing old songs and sounding like a horse on crack. There's no more risk taking. The movie business is the same way...Flight of the Phoenix redux. What a risk taker. Star wars part 6. Woot! Those rebels. Eminem...I hear he makes fun of his mother...what a nut!
How safe and predictable.
"yet meanwhile, millions of consumers are gobbling up DRM-laden tracks."
We know that there are a million songs sold, but I suspect this is coming from about 250K people. After all, if 250K people buy 10 songs (1 album), how many songs is that? Right.
Which is less than other places like Napster, and the other music services.
Its certainly less than Sirius and/or XM.
I'm not saying iTMS isn't reasonably successful, but Apple fanatics tend to overrate its success. While the iPod is very popular, most people have no clue what iTMS even *is*.
Or do you think people are filling up their 40G iPods with iTMS music?
modded troll? I thought this was pretty funny :)
That was a typo. I meant to say it is NOT illegal.
Unless he is so gifted that he could decode whichever client/server protocol iTunes uses in one-shot without having to connect his partially-written client several times like us mere mortal programmers would, then at some point he will have connected to iTunes with an illegitimate application and thus broken the ToS. I imagine at the very least it will have been connected once to test that it actually works. ...unless he has also written an iTunes server as well, but that's a whole other ball game.
Or better still get DVD Jon to reverse engineer the encrytion code so he can implement it for platforms besides Mac and Windows.
That means everyone has to update their client software...AGAIN. They just forced millions of people to upgrade, and now they do the same thing...again!?
How come when Microsoft tries to stop supporting, say, Windows 98 or VB6 like 8 years after release, everyone goes nuts, but you'd easily suggest Apple updates a core app used by millions of DESKTOP users TWICE, both times freezing them out of the service in the meantime, without batting an eyelash?
My post was cracked. sniff.
I guess I have to buy an iPod now.
Don't blieve the HYPE
Proof once again that a community (or single developer) can indeed garner the passion and committment to get past most any corporation-imposed technology barrier. That alone should stand to validate the power of OS.
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
Ahh, NO. Someone may have to connect but it does not have to be him.
Let's say I connect to iTunes with Apple's software and I pay for stuff as a normal user. While I'm doing it, I capture network traffic logs, debugger output, etc. Then I write a spec and hand it to Jon. He writes the code and hands it back. I run his stuff and the 'real' stuff and issue change requests. He implements the change requests and we iterate. His hands are clean (mine may be dirty but his are clean). He never connected to iTunes.
Or, I could reverse engineer it, build the server (as you mention) and let Jon code against my server.
The whole clean room reverse engineering methodology is more complex but similar in intent to this (you'd REALLY like both sets of hands to be clean).
u r ANAL
If you think CDs are overpriced, you don't magically have the right to steal it (and yes, it's theft...if GPL violations are "stolen source code" then piracy is theft).
So, if GPL violations are copyright (or -left if you prefer) infringement, then piracy isn't theft?
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Why do our "artists" have to work with these vultures?
Let's create some free, open source songs
They'll be more popular then the commercial ones like open source softwares
Jon broke iTunes' protection after Apple suposedly fixed it, so this is a different crack.
This application still requires that you *buy* the track from apple's store.
If no Linux user buys anything, then no users will use the application, therefore no harm has been committed.
Or you're talking out of your arse (differentiated from your head by being more pleasant looking and smelling better).
That is my problem how? I have money, they have product, why won't we swap?
If they sold flac or wav files, there would be no need to make a portable client, just write a webapp that takes my order and sends me the files I purchased.
This problem is of Apple's own making. Not my problem.
the main reason I don't buy CD's is because they still cost almost 4 times the price of a DVD on sale.
There's no comparison between the cost of DVDs and CDs. Selling records is basically the only way the artist/producer/record company have to make money off the music, and recover the cost of making the record. When a DVD is released, most likely, the movie is already profitable for the production company. When the movie was released in theaters, ticket sales paid for the whole thing -- if not in the US, then probably internationally. Of course, some movies are never profitable and the ones that completely bomb are just written off as failures and may never get released on DVD. The only thing DVD sales have to cover is the production cost of the DVD (which in some cases is considerable, but probably not comparable to the original cost of the movie).
That said, I think DVD prices are way too high. Their prices are inflated by the fact that they have to be more expensive than, e.g., a rental at Blockbuster -- otherwise no one would rent from Blockbuster. But at least there's some competition in DVD pricing! CDs seem to suffer from price-fixing a lot worse than DVDs do (a few years ago, the record companies had to pay out to customers after settling a suit for price-fixing).
I'm not a smorgasbord.
While this isn't enough to prove it in a court of law, in practice it would be really difficult to thoroughly debug the code without actually connecting oneself...
If the RIAA and MPAA want to stop piracy, they need to supply what the customer wants. ... Convenience is very important - if I could walk out of the cinema and buy a DVD of the film I had just seen, I would probably do so 70% of the time I go to the cinema. Since I have to wait 6 months for the DVD release (because they are paranoid that the DVD sales and resulting piracy will impact cinema attendance) then I frequently fail to buy DVDs that I had intended to purchase simply because I can't be bothered later on.
I'm not particularly interested in defending the MPAA and the movie theater system. But to be fair, what you cite above isn't just paranoia, it's true. Sure, that arrangement would be convenient to you (and I wouldn't mind it either), but most people aren't going to go back and see a movie more than once in the theater if they have the DVD. More importantly, if one of my friends goes and sees [insert popular new movie here] and buys the DVD, I'm not going to go see it in the theater, I'll just borrow the DVD from him and watch it. Therefore, the movie studio, the movie theater and any actors/producers/whatever who have "points" in the gross all lose out. So I don't think it's irrational on their part to have a delay between theatrical release and DVD release.
And no offense, but if you "can't be bothered" to buy a DVD after it comes out, then you probably didn't care much about it and were better off not buying it in the first place.
"95% of all Slashdot
It's certainly possible that Crystal Quest used the same sound, but it did not originate with Crystal Quest.
It's certainly possible that Crystal Quest used the same sound, but it did not originate with Crystal Quest.
Man somebody really hit a nerve on this one! I don't know why everyone is rushing to either lionize or demonize Jon (or Apple) here. Jon's a smart guy and you've got to respect him for his technical ability. Apple has made legit downloadable music a reality in an easy to use package and I think they deserve some respect for that. Remember what a HUGE obstacle to this the big labels and the RIAA were a couple of years ago before iTMS?
As a iTMS and iPod user, I've accepted Apple's DRM as a necessary evil and found that it doesn't really pose me too many problems. Does anyone REALLY think that the big record lables would let the iTMS exist without some DRM restrictions? Personally, I'll take those restrictions for the convenience and value that I get out of there being an iTMS.
I know there are alternatives and for indie music there are some good ones out there that I use in addition to the iTMS. If I want the latest U2 or Moby release though, I'm going to have to go to one of the big on-line stores, though. I'll take Apple's less restrictive DRM and better user experience vs. the big name alternatives. Yeah, that means I'm locked into the iPod, but if that becomes a problem I'll transcode to MP3 or AIFF and move on.
That said, I'll argue for my rights to do what I want with what I've PAID for. I won't criticize anybody for using or wanting to use Jon's software. IANAL, so I can't comment on the legality of creating, distributing or using it, but it OUGHT to be legal IMHO.
I've had my say. Thanks.
Once you lick the lollipop of mediocrity, you'll suck forever!
DRM is like lotsoffarts.wav
/. is good for you.
... is that everybody is assuming that "they" are out to get "you". The *IAA is only out for themselves. They see the breaking of Copy Protection/DRM/DRR/Whatever to be: "The pirates are taking our stuff and giving it away on that there internet"
What they fail to realize is that the collective "we" are not doing such and that is done by a select few. Also, given the fact that *IAA is putting more and more restrictive aspects upon us, we have to have work-arounds (by the black hats referenced as pirates previously) so that we can use our rightly paid for stuff in the way we expect (free as in beer). Thus the cat and mouse game.
Seeing as how anything can be made "digital" and since everything I can see/hear can break your DRM, I recommend you innovate and create some whole other experience that I will pay through the nose for and keep doing just that. This way whenever you innovate/entertain and then I break it you'll make new stuff and I am still amazed.
Currently, WE are the Jones and THEY are trying to keep up with US. They will only further spin a currently profitable business into the gound by trying to enforce DRM and other single-minded "solutions". All for a problem that they are inept with let alone biased as to the outcome. There are no free meals. As such, we will not provide them a free meal to the already available "entertainment". If they truly want money they should DO somthing to wow and dazzel us not beat us into submission.
Entertainment is no longer entertainment in the classic sense. I am not entertained by being able to watch/listen to my favorite TV show or band. I am entertained by being able to enjoy my band/show on my terms. The entertainment of gaining entertainment rules me.
"Yes men" and "good sales numbers" and a "profitable as predicted quarter" are, at best, a flawed business practice. It greys out the people that really make a company great... buyers!
Wrong. Selling records is the way the producer/record company make money off music. Most artists get their money from doing tours and live concerts. Only a small minority (like Madonna) get any actual cash from selling records.
Unless Fair Use has withered to next to nothing, stripping the DRM off your own iTunes files is not in breach of copyright. It might be in breach of any license you received from Apple but that is a license issue between the vendor and you and might lead to license termination.
So I think that makes it at most a Civil matter, not a criminal one. IANAL, IDLIN[1]
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
[1](I Don't Live In Norway).
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Is that surgical procedure cranial, gonadal or both?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
I think your 'single bit' analogy is a bit off-the-mark. There a variety of digital watermarking schemes which can be used to 'hide' a signature in the audio source itself. In the same way that most folks don't mind the imperfections in highly compressed (lossy) audio, the effects of digital watermarking are not noticable to most folks.
Your monitor is staring at you.
Artists own their work until they sign a contract and sell their work to the label. At that point, they negotiate for royalties. Generic pop acts whose value depends on the promotion and marketing of the label will have a hard time collecting royalties, but don't confuse the issue by equating royalties with Madonna. Independent labels pay royalties, too.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
The money an artist gets from those royalties is usually zero. The label usually claims they had enormous expenses in distribution or marketing (which is strange, since they manage to have vast profits). The artists gets a cut from the profits, which conveniently are nearly always zero.
Oh, nearly forgot. For many beggining artists, the contract usually states that they are getting zero from their first couple of records, to pay expenses of several sorts. In fact, I have known artists who have *paid* to get their record pressed, and get no cut from any profits that may arise.
A lack of interest? As soon as there's significant consumer interest in some product that uses MS DRM, mark my words, it will be broken.
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
Very similar to someone who provides a cable decoder, you mean?
Well assuming that it was a cable decoder that still required you to pay for your stations just like the companies one, then yes. The difference is that I can connect his cable decoder to my Linux TV. So I'll finally be able to start buying songs from them again.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Ah, but then your analogy is better than his, don't you think? I have the feeling that the orignal poster meant his pretty much as stated.
If people werent so fanatic about apple noone would put up with itunes DRM, but mac fans would rather pay then turn away from thier god. pathetic
It's possible there is a sound in Crystal Quest which sounds a bit like sosumi, but not copied.
The wiki emphasis is mostly about things OTHER than the sample's origins, so "not correct at all" is a bit of an exageration.
So relax, man.
Wonderful - you get sued and Jon doesn't. What's the advantage of this, other than creating a little more work for the lawyers?
Well, hopefully it is done in true clean room style then no one gets sued. Second, they can find Jon, they do not know about 'me'. And third, I haven't produced the software, I do not distribute the software, and sueing me doesn't stop distribution.
Remember, my 'crime' is accessing them with illegal software, which usually means I lose my account (NB: I have NOT read the actual Apple agreement, comment is based on knowledge of other agreements). Loss of account is not a big stick. Issues may or may not exist with 'circumventing DRM' but probably do not if I live in Norway. It's all about where you live and what you did not JUST what you did.
NB: If DRM is added by the client and I document the protocol to the server as a spec, I did not circumvent DRM as I didn't build anything or remove DRM from a protocol or file. I simply looked at a point where DRM did not exist (yeah, angels and heads of pins). I did not build anything that copied copyrighted material. I AM probably in violation of the agreement and that WOULD lead to cancelation of my account. I'm not sure if anything worse is apt to stick.
Where can you still download this? The entire website is down so there's no way to view the blog or anything. Anyone know where there are mirrors? Apple probably made it's employees go to the site and refresh it to death, or make it run out of bandwidth or osmething.
I don't sell sick stuff like Marilyn Manson or cop-killer rap, and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of.
chortle. If the story were true, it would be just another case of a retailer ignoring public demand and Darwinizing himself.
Now go back to your bosses at that PR firm and tell them you failed again.
I found this post as metamod, and I now go to give this tale the review it deserves.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Please visit Slashcode bug #981137 [sourceforge.net], which concerns automatically hyperlinking URLs in "Plain Old Text" mode, and add a comment to show your support for a speedy resolution. No progress has been made on this trivial feature request for longer than six months.
Redistribute this comment at will.
You must be new here.
The only problem resulution that has ever resulted so far in the mess that is this site is Michael Sims getting fired and I don't see it going anywhere from there.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
I don't know if this hack involves circumventing the payment system or only the DRM attached to paid-for songs
Neither.
Someone signs up at iTunes, they PAY for a download, and Apple sends them a music file without any DRM.
The normal software adds DRM after the download. This software just doesn't do do that extra step.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Or you could, you know, just not buy things with DRM. That's how you do things in a capitalist system.
I don't know what makes you think that you have to right to use copyrighted material however you please. Did you create it? No. So what gives you the right to say how it should be distributed.
DRM is stupid, but it's not because IP and copyright are stupid. DRM is stupid because it attempts the impossible. It doesn't accomplish anything, but it wastes the industry, and the users time and money.
In time outfits that sell non-DRM media may win out against those that use DRM. Blatant disregard for copyright, as is being shown by so many of the people and organizations you're referring to, is what causes people to think that DRM is needed. What these people are doing is actually ruining their cause by slowing industry acceptance digital technology and online distribution. The industry is busy trying to find ways to prevent copyright violations because these technological evangelists have shown such blatant disregard for copyright.
http://www.pyronecrophilia.com.nyud.net:8090/conte nt/pymusique/pymusique-0.4.tar.gz
"People have to stand up to copyright enforcers?"
I agree that DMCA in general and the music industry in particular have gone to far in their witch hunt, but give me a break. Are you honestly suggesting that anything anyone creates anywhere should immediately be public domain?
That's garbage.
I'm an independent filmmaker, and I'm putting a hell of a lot of time, effort, and money into making my first feature-length film. And quite frankly, pal, I have the right to benefit financially from my work. So does my cast and crew.
What makes you think you have the right to distribute my work,a nd to benefit from the work of my team, without contributing in the slightest to the production process, or even seeking my permission? I'm just curious.
Apple has spent an enormous amount of money to develop the iTunes store and to recruit music publishers. If they want to protect their investment by limiting usage to CDs and iPods, that's their right. I'm sorry, but Apple doesn't exist to service your every whim, and you're foolish to think they should. They're a business. And businesses need money to stay in business. Its simple economics. Maybe you should take a course or two.
Awesome work, restoring the rights of the consumer which were taken away in a blitz of branding everyone a pirate.
Business Voyeur
For real? Please provide a link if so :)
Sure! As soon as I see a link for the original...
Often times it is your responsibility as a citizen to break a law which is unjust. As an example, take Rosa Parks sitting in the front of the Bus. You might argue that she should have petitioned the beaurocratic goverment for redress, but that would not have been nearly as quick for such a clear injustice. You might argue that Rosa Parks was at least willing to stand up and take responsibility for breaking the law, but that is not always ethically required either. Take for instance the people who helped people escape from the South on the Underground Railroad. I think ethically in that case, exposing oneself to capture would reduce the number of slaves one could help, and thus hiding from the law is ethically justified. Now I'm not trying to equate slavery or racism with intellectual property in terms of importance, so let me give you a more direct example. I would argue that copyright law in its current form is at best unjust, and at worst, unconstitutional. If you look at the writings of the founding fathers, they viewed copyright as a necessary evil, but evil none the less. Copyright is not an inherent right in the same way as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inherent. Instead, copyright is a social contract which is designed to benefit the public rather than the individual. Look it up. Benefit to the individual is only the means by which the benefit to the public is accomplished. To get more specific, take the various revisions George Lucas has made to his Star Wars films. Now I agree that no one has the right to compel him to release these films. Once he does, however, in a very real sense, they belong to all of us. The social experience we all shared of the original films, and the cultural impact are not and should not be owned by him. I'm not saying others should be able to profit from his work, necessarily, but I am saying that he has no right to retract the original work from the public stage. That destroys the notion that copyright is a social contract. To illustrate my point, lets say the Shakespear family decided they didn't like how Romeo and Juliet ended, and they wanted to retract the original, and substitute a version where they live happily ever after. Most people would agree that this would be an outrage. George Lucas is attempting this very thing with Star Wars, and I have therefore downloaded the original versions. I own the original versions on video tape, but they are rapid decaying. I also own the DVD versions, but they are not the same as the originals. Legally I may or may not be right, however, as I see it, I am preserving history which I am entitled to do. I have also paid for this movie twice, and would gladly do so a third time if the originals are released. George Lucas, however, has no right to alter history simply because he didn't like the way it occurred the first time around. I'm guessing you will disagree, but that's just an opinion. Legally, my decision is ambiguous, however ethically, I believe I am in the right. Take that for what you will.