Slashdot Mirror
FairUse4WM Breaks Windows DRM
An anonymous reader writes "FairUse4WM, according to engadget, "can be used to strip Windows Media DRM 10 and 11". What does the slashdot community think of this development in the ongoing cat-and-mouse game going on between big media and what is available online?"
You have the right to manipulate the magnetization on your harddisk in any way, right?
I've used yahoo music for a year, and now Urge (Urge is far better from a user interface viewpoint). I think these services are great! I know this is against some singulatarians--but I hope this gets patched up quick. Look at the differences between iStore and this. I can download all I want--and the bookmarks are even saved so I can download to another computer! If you lost your tracks in iStore, you're out the money. I don't want the iStore to be the only game in town!
Yeah, information wants to be free and all that. But this service rocks. I haven't bought a CD since (probably not what they want to hear!) And it works fine with portable music players. You just have to plug it in every few weeks-which you can do to get more music anyway. Yeah, a bit annoying, but come singularity we won't have any limitations.
I think the next Slashdot story will be about the authors' arrest for DMCA violation. :-(
I doubt Microsoft will let this slide.
If a company rents discs with digital data on them, many Slashdotters will claim the right to rip them before returning. If a company rents DRM'ed files, tools will be created to strip the DRM. Is rental an unenforceable, and thus obsolete, business model? Or will companies simply accept the "shrinkage"?
But they didnt.
Wincopy
And before everyone says, "Well you shouldn't have to burn and rerip", I do agree, but I would be burning for a backup copy anyway, not to mention to listen in the car that doesn't have the iPod adapter.
So can someone please tell me why breaking DRM is news, my CD burner and I have been doing it for years.
I own some Apple DRM'd music, and I want to play it on my mobile 'phone, which supports AAC. I want to play it on my spare machine that runs FreeBSD. I can do both of these with AACs I've ripped from CD, but not with iTMS DRM'd music.
it has never been legal for me to transfer rights to other people's work and that's all that (Apple's) DRM stops me from doing.
If my musical tastes change, I can sell music I own on CD. I can't resell iTMS music. Transferring rights is find from a copyright perspective under the doctrine of first sale. If I buy a CD, I can sell it on. I have to delete all of my backups, but I don't violate copyright law by selling it.
Copyright should be about the right to make and distribute copies. If I create something copyrightable (and I'm a writer, so this is not just a gedanken experiment), I have the right to restrict who distributes copies of it. That is the only right I have under copyright law. I don't have the right to say 'blind people are not allowed to feed it through a screen reader.' I don't have the right to say 'you may not read this from a mobile device.' I don't even have the right to say 'you may not photocopy a few pages of this book to read on the train when you don't want to lug the entire book with you.' If you want to tear pages out of a book I've written, or change the font of something I've written for online distribution, then that is entirely up to you; I don't have the legal (or moral) right to tell you not to.
Copyright is a limited monopoly on distribution granted to encourage the production of content. It is not a right, and it is not a privilege; it is a trade. The state awards me limited rights in exchange for my relinquishing others (which I could retain by simply not publishing). We both win; I gain a method of producing income, while others gain access to the material I produce. By exercising copyright, I am agreeing to this; I am saying 'I wish to retain exclusive distribution rights, in exchange for publishing this work and permitting others to purchase it.' DRM alters this balance. If I publish a DRM'd version of something, then I am attempting to retain more control than copyright grants me. This is nothing more and nothing less than vigilanteism.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Does this tool work for Janus-locked files (commonly used in "ToGo" services)?
A little backdrop for context -
Like a lot of people, I travel a lot (commute to work, business trips, family, etc...). I have a Creative Zen Touch 40GB w/PlayForSure update that I've been pretty pleased with for the past year. However, last April I was doing my semi-annual reinstall of Windows on my Tablet PC. Being quite naive, I just assumed backing up My Music would be sufficient for license back-up -- after all, it contains the "My License Backup" folder. So you know, just going with that. Noooo sirreee, Rhapsody will have none of that. It informed me that each DRM'd file I had used with RhapsodyToGo didn't have a valid license or was corrupt. The only way I could get the files to update their licenses was to queue the files needing a license update for download, pause the download, then cancel the download. This worked great for files on my computer, but the licenses wouldn't transfer to my MP3 player. Additionally, my playlists were broken because of this mess. These inconveniences, coupled with the fact that I don't feel like browsing through Rhapsody's unresponsive IE-control and manually selecting the gigabytes of locked-up and unplayable files on my tablet and MP3 player forced me back to BitTorrent.
Words cannot capture how fucking frustrating it is to have a 5 hour drive ahead of you and be presented with a "No License To Play File" message when you try to play half the files on your MP3 player. No warning, no hint, not even a goddamn "License will expire in x days" message when I downloaded the file originally. Which brings me to another point -- I pay my RhapsodyToGo subscription quarterly, why the fuck should I have to update once a month? . Or put more accurately -- GUESS when I should have to update during the month, because that's part of the fun - YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT DAY THE FILES EXPIRE.
Anyways, I got kinda off track there. I simply downloaded MP3s and FLACs of the music I wanted and replaced most of the DRM'd horseshit, but certain artists (e.g., Robert Johnson, Blind Willie Johnson, Muddy Waters, hell even mainstream artists like Jeff Beck) are harder to find on P2P networks and BitTorrent trackers. So a tool which could unlock the files I've legitmately acquired would be really great.
If anyone from Microsoft or RealNetworks is reading this -- I'm trying to do the right thing, but you're making it so fucking difficult. It's almost as if you want me to pirate the music.
"You and your third dimension."
It isnt really helpful to have a right...that you cannot excercise in any fashion without breaking the law...
Helpful, yes... required, no. US citizens have a right to bear arms for a purpose of protection from the government, however it is illegal to use those arms against the government.
No, the people who are complaining the most and trying to find software to break DRM protections are the people who don't want to pay for the latest CD they heard on the radio. That is all that this discussion is about.
Umm... No. People that Pirate don't give a fuck about DRM because they are already circumventing it and hence do not complain. These people are either using audio video hijack programs and analog loop holes and don't really care about quality as long as its free.
The people that are complaining about DRM are those who are getting fucked by it or can't buy online media because they don't want to have to be tied in to that companies DRM and loose all their music when the company goes bankrupt or a software glitch hoses their authorization key.
Its why I won't buy iTunes music... I really don't like the idea of a hard drive crash killing my music and I have to pay for it all over again because I had to jumps through hoops of fire to back that data up (yeah I could burn it to audio cd and then back again but each time you burn from lossey and re-encode to lossey formats from that cd you loose quality big time. Not to mention you will have to manually type in the CD track names over again).
Until I get unecumbered MP3 downloads, I won't pay for it online. I'll stick to going to the local indie store and buying it there and then ripping it.
On the same note, I won't pirate a song either because the music I like is hard to find and online music sounds like crap or cuts out at the end. I'm willing ot spend that extra money for the quality but at the same time I don't want to pay for it twice if something goes wrong on the technical side of DRM.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I understand that, given the chance, most consumers will steal media without a second thought.
I think this is true, although perhaps a bit too strong. What's interesting to me is *why* it's true, because I've found that most people are quite honest. They wouldn't dream of stealing a CD from a store, so why would they create an infringing copy of the same content?
I think the answer is: Because the media industry has screwed itself.
I think the reason people don't see infringement as immoral is because they don't understand the social contract that underlies copyright law. And that's because the social contract has been trashed so thoroughly by the media industry that it's effectively invisible. Joe Average isn't stupid, but he's not an IP lawyer and given that he has never seen any copyrights expire during his lifetime, and may never see it, the notion that copyright is a tradeoff of short-term disadvantage for long-term advantage never occurs to him, because as far as he knows it's just a permanent restriction. Ask Joe who owns the copyright to Shakespeare's works and he's likely to think it's a reasonable question.
Since Joe doesn't see that tradeoff, he evaluates infringement in its most direct, immediate terms: Who does it hurt, who does it help, and how do those balance? Who does it hurt? Well, no one, really. Perhaps Joe might have paid for it if he couldn't copy it, but maybe not, and besides those musicians are already millionaires, so it's not like anyone is going to go hungry. The pain inflicted by the loss of a single sale on someone who lives in a mansion and drives a Ferrarri is negligible. Who does it help? Why, Joe. Not in any huge way, but it gives him some music to listen to that he might not have otherwise been able to afford.
Ignoring the issue of what copyright is supposed to do, Joe's moral calculus is compelling. Weighing a clear good against a questionable and negligibly-small bad, the result is a no-brainer. If you throw in arguments about what would happen if everyone copied instead of buying, the waters are muddied a bit, but since that's not in imminent danger of occurring, it's a red herring.
If the media industry wants Joe to feel some moral obligation to honor copyright, they should push to go back to reasonable copyright terms, so that Joe can see the value of the copyright system as evidenced by the flow of materials into the public domain. When there's lots of stuff that he can copy, legally and without qualm, he'll be more concerned about the propriety of making infringing copies.
Personally, I saw that evolution in myself with respect to software. Before I switched over to using primarily Free software, I had no qualms about copying software that I knew I wasn't going to purchase -- and that even though I was a software developer making my living from copyrighted software. When I found that I could do most of what I needed to without infringing, though, I began to be offended by the idea of casual infringement. After a few years of Free software usage, I actually get angry at people who illegally copy software, and I don't use any commercial software without paying for it. I also don't copy music or movies illegally. I do download TV shows, but only because I can justify that I could have sucked them off the cable, albeit less conveniently.
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