Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Jon Johansen Breaks iTunes DRM Yet Again

Posted by timothy on from the bad-jon-naughty-jon dept.

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!"

4 of 1,286 comments (clear)

  1. More power to you, Jon, and I stand by that! by ikewillis · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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. 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.

  2. Re:Companies won't let us "Get over it" by jimbolaya · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Well, actually that's the doctrine of first sale. 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. They just cannot forbid you from doing so.

    In other words, your "rights" are not being violated by DRM.

    --

    There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.

  3. Jeez... by sethadam1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:So sue him? by mrpuffypants · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Interesting side note too: If you check the code for Apple's web pages, the CSS class for all of their tiny-text legal phrases is named "sosumi".

    Check it out: www.apple.com -> view source -> search for "sosumi" :)