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?"

Comments

Headline incorrect.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

FairUse4WM Breaks Windows DRM

should read:

FairUse4WM Fixes Windows DRM

'cause it makes something previously unusable, usable. (Not that I will ever be using this app, I've never been stupid enough to buy a DRM encumbered piece of content).

Oh - and for those hoping it stripped the DRM from WMV9. Nope, WMA DRM only.

Re:Headline incorrect.

[tomstdenis]

Well just think about this. DRM is their way of saying "fork over your money, you'll get to use it on our terms."

You may not have hit a DRM wall but that could because

1. You're not an enthuiast
2. You don't know what your rights are anyways [fairuse?]
3. You're not doing anything special with your media.

Try making a backup [shock! that's legal!] or a clip for a class or ...

Try to watch that movie on a "non-approved" device? Try to listen to that music CD in your computer, try to ...

DRM breaks otherwise valid products in a futile attempt to extract more money out of you.

Tom

Re:Headline incorrect.

[hyfe]

FairUse4WM is going to be rightly bitch slapped by Microsoft.

It's only "rightly" if you assume Moraly==Legality.

Piracy of software and music is still piracy and still illegal.

Actually, in consumer-protecting sizzy-countries like the Scandinavians ones, where the rights of re-sale and free-use trumps contracts, terms-of-use and EULA's there's a good chance DRM-stripping is not only legal, but a civil right. Too bad we've never tested it in court (from the correct angle).

So even if you assume Morailty==Legality, legality does differ from country to country.

Re:Headline incorrect.

[SirTalon42]

What does DRM have to do with Piracy?

One encourages the other. And I'll let you in on a little secret, it's not the one the RIAA wants you to think.

Re:Headline incorrect.

[TheRaven64]

basically with Apple DRM *I* can do whatever *I* want to do, I just can't give the same right to other people. and isn't that what copyright is all about anyway?

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.

Re:Headline incorrect.

[Richard Steiner]

1.) I have over 12,500 songs in my collection. All WMA. All play fine on my WMA playback devices, of which I have four.

My music collection is roughly the same size, but I use MP3 files instead. I have many more playback devices (two car stereos, two discman units, several PCs running various OSes, component stereo in sitting room, home theatre system in living room, and a boombox).

2.) I know well what my rights are. They are listed right in the EULA when I installed the various Music Stores. They ARE NOT MY SONGS. They belong to the artist or the record label, right or wrong.

99% of the songs I have in MP3 format are ripped from my own CDs. I also know what my rights are, and since I did not have to sign or accept a EULA I suspect I have signicantly more flexibility than you do in terms of what I can legally do with the music I've purchased over the years. :-)

3.) Define special...

It's a term I sometimes use to describe people who are willing to accept a severe curtailing of their rights and think the whole concept is a really neat idea. It isn't, except to the middle men who do the distributing, and both the artist and the listener get screwed in the process.

It seems to me the only people that have problems with DRM are the ones that think everything should be free and the ones who do regularly steal music and software.

I've been collecting LPs since 1976 and CDs since 1986, and I pirate neither music nor software. That doesn't mean I agree with DRM schemes or the rationale behind them.

I also believe that some software is far more efficiently produced in a free environment, but acknowledge that proprietary software development has its place. I don't pirate software -- open source provides most of my new applications and utilities on all of the platforms I use, but I'll register shareware I use and purchase retail software when necessary.

Face it: history is against you, and against those who would use DRM. In the end, DRM will not work. It's as effective as classic software copy protection schemes were -- only those who are legitimate customers are limited by them, and actual pirates typically have cracks to the various schemes within days if not hours.

It's fine if you accet DRM and its limitations, but that doesn't mean *I* have to.

Re:Headline incorrect.

[syphax]

Doug,

The point is that if DRM continues to creep into our world, there won't much music/video/etc available that come with a use agreement that I can abide by.

Beyond personal use, those who oppose DRM do so realizing that this is in part a struggle of how we want our society to operate- more open and free, or more closed and proprietary. More broadly, it's a struggle/conversation/battle/whatever about how best to distribute rights between content creators and consumers.

So while I don't endorse violating copyright law any more than I endorse violating any law, I do endorse getting copyright law modified to benefit society more fully- or at least getting people to use copyright law in a more beneficial manner (eg Creative Commons).

Bottom line, I don't accept the 'just do what works for you' apology for DRM, because that's a sinking ship. I oppose DRM because it represents a value system that I don't like so much.

Re:Headline incorrect.

[acousticiris]

Let me speak to the "stupid enough to buy DRM encumbered content" market...since I *was* stupid enough.

I subscribed to Yahoo! Music Unlimited, upgraded my Windows Media Player, installed all of the patches and purchased a brand spanking new Creative Zen Vision last year.
The whole setup process was about two hours after the litany of patches and firmware upgrades, but it worked...actually very well...
Then one day, about 7 months later, it failed.

For no explainable reason other than "DRM is garbage", my player decided to play only the first song downloaded, and then claim that every other song was unlicensed thereafter. It didn't matter which track, the minute it skipped to the next one, everything was unplayable that was DRM'd.

You can imagine how abundantly helpful Yahoo!'s tech support was (not at all). So I cancelled my subscription.

Lets add up my total costs:
1-year Subscription (at the time $4.99/month, now $9.99): $59.88
New media player for subscription content: $399.99 (somewhere in that range)
Number of tracks effectively "rented" for seven months: ~150
Total Cost "the day the music died": $459.87 or >$3.00/tracks I didn't get to keep.

Sure, I factored the player into the cost and maybe that's not fair since I still use it for videos and music (and I would buy it again, today, if given a choice), but the fact remains that I had to buy a new player because only a select few are subscription compatible.
I won't resubscribe now that this tool is available because my guess is that Microsoft will have this hole patched before the week is out (Here's betting they don't wait until "Patch Tuesday" for this update, we all know where their priorities are).

So I have access to less music (legally) "at my finger-tips", but at least I get to enjoy the music on all of my PCs, my stereo, my two players, and wherever the heck else I can adapt the unencumbered tracks to.
It's amazing to me that something that was "standard" 100 years ago (unencrypted/encumbered music) is now the first feature I look for in music I buy.

Re:Headline incorrect.

[Xichekolas]

So you're telling me that you never played with Legos as a kid? or Barbies? Or Lincoln Logs? Or the little games where you stick shapes into their corresponding holes? Did your teacher never read you books in class? Did you never sing songs for a school concert? Did you ever watch Donald in Mathmagic Land?

I know I did all these things in school. In fact, I'm sure I learned just about everything from playing games (entertainment), watching movies (entertainment), and listening to/singing songs (entertainment).

In fact, short of a direct brain interface, not sure how you would teach children anything if you couldn't entertain them in the process. They just wouldn't pay attention. Heck, the only reason I practiced multiplication tables was to win our math races... and we spent a week during our poetry unit in Junior english listening to and analyzing song lyrics (The Sound of Silence and Stairway to Heaven included)... and I expressly remember singing along to that Kokomo song (by the Beach Boys) in first grade at a school play... it would've been a shame if the RIAA had shown up then and busted poor Mrs. Sanderson for playing it...

How sad society would be if our kids had to learn without entertainment...

ones and zeros

[rjdegraaf]

You have the right to manipulate the magnetization on your harddisk in any way, right?

Follow-up; Cory Doctorow on DRM at MSFT

[Noksagt]

They've already written a follow-up: An open letter to Microsoft: Why you shouldn't kill FairUse4WM.

This whole thing reminds me of Cory Doctorow's DRM and MSFT: A Product No Customer Wants.

Re:Follow-up; Cory Doctorow on DRM at MSFT

[Ravensfire]

Or more accurately titled "Dear Microsoft: Please don't bitchslap us"

-- Ravensfire

Re:Actually hope they fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

The iTunes music store is quite clear that if you accidently delete your iTunes downloads, you're SOL. There are plenty of accounts of people who've lost iTunes downloads who've had Apple tell them to repay to redownload or fuck off.

Plus, once you've gone past five times that Apple's decided your computer is different, you also lose all your music. Gone. Locked out.

Apple is just as evil as the rest of them. At least the "rent music" places are telling you up front that you're just renting and that you can lose the ability to play your downloads at the drop of a hat.

Are people inherently immoral?

[swillden]

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.