Slashdot Mirror
DVD Jon's DoubleTwist Unlocks the iPod
An anonymous reader writes, "On the 5-year anniversary of the iPod, Fortune Magazine has an article called Unlocking the iPod about Jon Lech Johansen's new venture. Slashdot briefly covered DoubleTwist earlier this month, and those of you who complained that he was not enabling iPod competitors to play FairPlay files will be happy to learn that according to the Fortune article he will also be going after the hardware market." From the article: "As [Johansen] and Farantzos explain DoubleTwist in a conference room they share with several other companies, he points to a sheet of printer paper tacked on the wall that has a typed quote Jobs gave the Wall Street Journal in 2002: 'If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own.' As Johansen sees it, Jobs didn't follow through on this promise, so it's up to him to fix the system... Johansen has written [two] programs...: one that would let other companies sell copy-protected songs that play on the iPod, and another that would let other devices play iTunes songs."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this constitute a blatant violation via reverse-engineering of the Fairplay DRM? I'm not saying I disagree with his actions, I'm just asking the question...
I left my wallet in El Sigundo!
.. at least, it is for me. I bought some music from iTunes a while ago, when my iPod was still working, and - oh the irony - lost it when I switched over to a Mac Mini. So what did I do? I tried to download the music in question, since I'd paid for it, right? Apparently not - once you've downloaded music on iTunes, you don't get to download it again. What a waste of money.
Basing your lifes work and new company on an obscure quote from 4 years ago seems a bit niave. If we held all companies responsible for promises from their CEOs no company would ever stand up to it.
If Apple wants to DRM their music that is their choice. If people want to buy DRM music that is their choice. No one is forcing you to buy iPods, iTunes, or CDs, if you don't like it, don't buy it. Just because it's socially acceptable to hack DRM doesn't mean its legal or right.
Good thing we don't base our lives around things said in the Constitution in the 1700s, eh?
You must not have that big of a music library if you don't realize something is very wrong with this. I should not have to pay for hundreds of blank CDs just to be able to transfer my music collection.
"It's a reverse vampire...they....they crave the sun!"
The problem isn't that he's writing software that allows people to copy music to other devices they own. As has been said, that's allowed.
The problem is that he's writing software that allows people to copy music to device they DON'T own. To send the files over the net. To burn copies and sell them on the street.
If DVD Jon was smart, he'd write software that would unlock FairPlay, allow the user to copy it to another device, and then lock it down again (through FairPlay or whatever else). If the user wanted to copy it to 5 devices that he/she owned, he would have to copy it manually to each one, and it would always lock afterwards. That way, he would get Apple/MPAA/etc. off his back. Heck, he could even make a worthwhile business out of it.
Instead, he's created software that unlocks and stays unlocked. It just looks like a thinly-veiled tool for piracy.
If you want to play the word game ("Steve Jobs said this") don't mince them, Jon. He didn't say we should create tools to totally strip DRM so we could then copy files across the net. Artists make enough money already, they won't miss it, blah blah blah -- fact of the matter is there are artists who *are* working to eat, and we have to respect copyrights at least a little for them. Otherwise may as well throw out capitalism in the digital distribution age.
{IANAL and other disclaimers here}
The best thing about DVD Jon's work is that it proves, disturbingly and resoundingly, that the current *AA business model based on DRM is at best faulty, and at worst an attack on fair use and civil liberties. While that sounds a bit over the top, imagine a world where there were no DVD Jon's to show that the big corporations locks can be picked. Imagine a world where the emporer's new clothes were never laughed at?
The point being that this only serves to help illuminate, in the minds of lawmakers, how feeble the current DRM schemes and laws really are, whether the work is ultimately found illegal or not.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
It's fairly easy to play DRM'd iTunes Music Store music on any MP3 player. All you do is burn an audio CD from the DRM'd files and then rip that CD into MP3s.
It's fairly easy to further degrade shitty quality 128k AAC files from iTunes. All you do is burn an audio CD from shitty quality compressed DRM'd AAC files and then rip that CD into another shitty, lossy, and compressed audio codec of your choice (in this case MP3).
Great idea.
After all, "WE THE PEOPLE" grant "creators" the temporary right to restrict others from copying their work. We in no way, shape, or form grant a permanent right to restrict others from copying works. So, what happens at the end of "the temporary right"? I mean, will iPods suddenly allow us unrestricted use of legally purchased files?
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
There are still some heroes still in the world of technology.
Unfortunately, "DVD Jon" has a big target painted on his back. As soon as the large international multimedia corporations use their political influence to normalize intellectual property laws on both sides of the pond, they'll come after him. This isn't about copy protection, per se. It's about creating and preserving monopolies. It's about making huge piles of money outside the constraints of competition.
DMCA type laws are a perversion of the rights balance between content producers and consumers. They should be abolished, not enhanced.
And a complete pain. Tell that to someone who has bought say 20-50 CDs worth of music off iTunes (not me, I just have the free album that came with my iPod).
"You can use whatever player you want. All you have to do is waste 50 blank CD-Rs (or a CD-RW)) by copying your music to CD then back. Best of all, after you've wasted all that time, you'll have to waste space by using lower compression just to get it to sound about the same."
The fact is, I'd have a hard time switching off the iPod if I wanted to unless the new player supported AACs. I've got about half my music collection ripped off of CDs into AAC and I would not want to do it again just to switch.
But then again, I'm quite happy with my iPod. I don't think too much of iTMS, but I like having physical property (the CD), not a licence to some bits.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
It's actually a lot easier than that. Use a faked-up sound driver that dumps the audio to a file. Works every time.
What would Lemmy do?
If DVD Jon was smart, he'd write software that would unlock FairPlay, allow the user to copy it to another device, and then lock it down again
And what of the copy to another device? How exactly do you dictate what happens to it?
Look. Jon is simply giving people The Tools to do whatever they would wish to do with their purchases. If you do something illegal with the tools, that's your problem. Same could be said of owning a car. Or a gun. Or a freaking two by four for that matter.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
There are actually quite a few non-Apple players that support unprotected AAC. AAC is not an Apple-proprietary format. It's owned by Dolby and Apple is merely a licensee.
``It's fairly easy to play DRM'd iTunes Music Store music on any MP3 player. All you do is burn an audio CD from the DRM'd files and then rip that CD into MP3s. That's it.''
Easy, perhaps, but time-consuming and labor intensive. Not exactly what you would be paying for when using iTunes, whose major selling point is convenience (at least, it's neither cheap, nor do you get great value).
``You might have to rip at higher bitrate to make sure you capture all the original audio information,''
It won't help. The AAC files iTunes sells already aren't great quality (according to independent listening tests; of course, Apple will tell you different). You can never get back the information that was lost in the conversion to AAC, and you will be losing more information in the conversion to MP3, no matter what bitrate you use.
``but it's perfectly doable--and legal.''
So are buying your music on CDs (which gives you higher quality and no DRM), buying it from AllofMP3 (AFAIK; IANAL; AllofMP3 lets you determine format and bitrate/quality, and does not impose DRM on you), and, in many places (but not the USA, AFAIK), copying music from a friend or downloading it off your favorite filesharing network.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I'm sure this makes me unpopular, but I'm going to say it anyway. Anyone who buys DRM'd music is either an idiot or ignorant, and it's a shame so few of them have learned their lesson yet. In this case, you're paying for a vague not-a-promise that you can probably listen to the music now and if you're really lucky you'll be able to listen in the future.
If music really needed DRM to be a profitable business, I wouldn't still be able to buy CDs. So the only reason I can buy a CD and turn it into MP3s yet can't buy those MP3s to start with is because some jackass in a skyscraper either doesn't understand his own business or is trying really hard to pretend not to.
That should get some discussion going.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
All of these lamentations about Apple cheating and *AA "suing its customers" — what is your problem? It is Apple's own device, and it is *AA's customers. If you don't like these companies, then stop using the darn things.
The "Joe Sixpack" you pretend to be concerned about may be excused, but you — your real concern — may not. You — the /.-crowd — know full well, that the DVD you are buying can not be put online for everyone to donwload (whether it is, actually, stealing, or merely copyright violation is irrelevant). You knew, iTunes will limit your downloads and sharing abilities...
So, why do you buy these things from these corporations and other entities you so dislike? Was life really so miserable before DVDs and portable digital-audio players? It was not. And now, despite all of the above-listed limitations, it is only better...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
``The best thing about DVD Jon's work is that it proves, disturbingly and resoundingly, that the current *AA business model based on DRM is at best faulty, and at worst an attack on fair use and civil liberties.''
Or, alternatively, it proves that DRM alone isn't going to stop people from doing illegal things with content, and we need to crack down on tools made to circumvent the DRM to protect the *AA's interests.
And since the government holds the interests of the corporations over civil rights, it's the latter interpretation that gets used, and we get the DMCA, which is then globally enforced, because the USA is currently King of the Hill.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
OK.
I lost them when I loved,
Can you talk about it in public?
So what did I do?
Please tell us all about it!
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
'but the other devices you own will all be iPods.'
Sort of the Henry Ford line of thinking: ... as long as you want black."
"You can have any color Model T you want
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Sorry if this is offtopic.
If I buy a CD, I can stick it in my computer and rip it into iTunes. That's legal, right?
If I buy a DVD, why can't I do the same thing? Rip it into iTunes, put it on my iPod, import it into other programs and play with it, etc.
Is there a fundamental difference between video content and audio content?! Why? Is it just that CDs were invented before DRM? That when CDs were standardized, the technology didn't exist to import and "get at" that audio content - technology that for the media companies "necessitated" DRM?
So, back to the question: Is it legal to import CDs? (I hope so.) Is it legal to import DVD's a la DVD Jon's software? (I assume the media companies would say no.) Why?!
In this brave new world of DRM, the rules are made by what The Companies technologically let you do, rather than what the laws actually decree. I am sure that once CDs go by the wayside, all content (audio, video, commercial software) will be DRM'd and authenticated to "make sure" that you cannot distribute it in any way once it gets to you - no matter what media is used to get it to you. I'm not looking forward to it.
I didn't and it doesn't. Where do people get these ideas?
The transaction is nominally a sale and practically a lease. Continued use of a song requires an active account with the iTunes Store, which is subject to certain terms of service, which is not a license. Use on a desktop computer requires at least QuickTime and usually iTunes, which are subject to licensing agreements--the software, not the songs.
#1 Download Audacity or some other F/OSS audio program that allows you to capture and edit sounds from your sound card.
#2 Buy MP3 Freeplay Songs from Apple iTunes for your iPod or to play on iTunes.
#3 Open up Audacity, select your sound card output as the source, check the volume. Get the record button ready on a new audio file. Hit the record button in Audacity and hit the play button on iTunes, when the iTunes program is finished playing the song, stop the recording and cut out the silence between the song playing and "Export" to MP3 or OGG or whatever format you wish to export to. (Might need the LAME library to make a MP3)
#4 You now have a MP3 or OGG file without any DRM, quality may vary. Play it on your Non-Freeplay, Linux, OS/2, BeOS, whatever system or music player.
If the RIAA and Apple throws a hissy fit about this, reference the MPAA verses BetaMax case and the RIAA verses Casette recorders case, and see how TiVO brought about digital rights to make recordings of TV shows, movies, songs, etc as long as you paid for access to them first or got them off a free broadcast.
Remember as long as you own the rights to listen to a song, you have a right to a backup. This method does not remove DRM, nor does it crack it, in fact it does not even modify the original SafePlay file, all it does is make a standard audio file recording of the audio file you have the rights to listen to anyway. The downside is that it takes a long while to convert your collection over that way, but the upside is that it is not costly to do so.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I was about to explain the basics of data compression to you. But this is slashdot. You shouldn't be that stupid. Go do an internet search for "lossy compression." Find out what happens when you take the output of one lossy-compressed piece of data, then compress it again with a different lossy-compression algorithm.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The earlier poster has a good point. iPods and iTunes are based on the concept that you get music by either buying it from the iTunes store, downloading a legal mp3, or Ripping a CD, which used to be a haxt00r thing, now it's commonplace. Even W does it, well, he has someone do it for him, I'm sure.
But the DVD content. I got the latest Weird Al album, iTunes lets me copy the music. It's a duodisk, so I can flip the cd, it's now a dvd. I don't have a DVD player on my computer, so I copied the relevant (videos) DVD file onto a CD at a friend's computer, took the copy home, then converted that to Quicktime on my computer for viewing..
None of these things are going anywhere outside of my house, let alone the internets. Did I break the law, which ones, and at what point?
I've gotten iTunes music before, too. Immediately converted them to non-DRM content. (using one of Jon's earlier programs.)
Didn't share them. Lawbreaker? I still have the original m4a's. Last played: over a year ago. I listen to my non-DRM'd copies.
Infinity is overrated, Infinity+1, now that's cool!
And to think, Steve Jobs did not have to spend one cent of Apples money to make good on that promise and the end result is still the same :)
"Gentlemen, You cannot fight in here, this is the War Room...." - Dr Strangelove
'If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own.'
Thing is, lost in the transcription is that Jobs was talking to two people. To clarify:
"If you [the consumer] legally acquire music, you [the copyright holder] need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you [the consumer] own."
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I was going to be equally condescending to you. But this is slashdot. Oh, wait.... Re-read the thread. I was responding to a suggestion that the best way of getting the raw data out of iTunes was burning to a CD. Uncompressing then putting the bits out to a WAV file introduces no more losses than uncompressing and burning the bits to a CD. If you compress a second time, the results are the same whether the data comes from a CD or a WAV.
What would Lemmy do?
Of course it is. What's happening here, I'm not used to 2 karma, is that all the idiots that bought into i-tunes and apple computers for that matter are way too dumb to hack the tunes free by themselves. Not surprising really. After all they were smart enough to buy a MAC, but of course MACs are for the "it just works crowd" .... it's gonna be blindingly stupid in there.
... Standards and Practices !
That should get my karma back whrer it belongs.
PenGun
Do What Now ???
Sony and Archos both have models that play unprotected AAC files, as does Microsoft's Zune. There are others too. A good place to find more info on this is here:
http://www.anythingbutipod.com/
Just get jHymn to strip the copy protection of your downloaded tracks, then convert them to whatever format you wish:
http://hymn-project.org/jhymndoc/
There is even a previous slashdot article...
> DT isn't even the first, Real was looking to license their reverse engineering results.
What Real was trying was totally different and could NOT have been stopped by a patent fight. Real was trying to add a module to an iPod to support THEIR closed garden DRM scheme. And as should have been obvious to a small child, Apple thwarted it by continually changing the firmware/software in the iPod. Real produced code implementing Real's DRM schemes was totally legal and immune to a patent fight though.
This is different. If I'm reading this right DT would produce FairPlay encoded tracks. Apparently Apple really was stupid enough to produce a system that didn't sign every track with a public key known only to Apple (or not even DVD-Jon could have done squat to break it open) so an iPod won't be able to tell the difference between an iTunes store produced track and a Walmart.com track. Obviously Apple has patents on FairPlay (yea, patenting DRM, crypto, being cool enough to have Steve bless it, exactly what is non-obvious but they certainly will fight) along with DMCA and any other legal (or not) anti-competitive tricks they can think up.
All of Apple's anti-competitive tricks probably won't be enough legal noise to stop anyone of even moderate means though. There isn't a single thing in FairPlay that isn't self evident to anyone with half a clue so it would only be a matter of someone being willing to spend the cash to push the case to a win. The actaul payload behind the DRM is a standard. While AC3 IS encumbered with patents (that would probably stand up) they aren't owned by Apple and are available under RAND terms.
Democrat delenda est
Perhaps someone can explain to me where this expectation of interoperability comes from with online (and specifically iTunes) music purchases... Apple makes it very clear that what they're selling you is for consumption using iTunes and iPod only. They even thrown in the ability to burn to a CD, at which point you can do whatever you want!
Perpend:
- nobody buys PS2 games and complains that they don't work on your XBOX
- nobody buys DVDs and then complain that they don't work on VCR
- nobody buys a CD at HMV and then complains that it doesn't fit into your ghetto old walkman
- nobody buys MS Office for Windows with the expectation that it'll run natively on their PowerMac G5
By the logic people seem to be applying here, there should be much outrage that there isn't the interoperability above, but if you ask about doing such thinks people claim that demanding such things is absurd. They'd probably pull out something like "Mechanically, they're different" or "Stop being an idiot, you buy PS2 games for PS2s, not XBOX!"
Apple isn't any more or less clear about what they're selling than the above examples. Just because the "container" happens to be software rather than a physical objet like a CD doesn't mean that there should be an expectation of interoperability. If you feel it's too limiting and it doesn't meet your needs, don't buy from them!
Who here REALLY believes that the game they bought for PS2 should be playable on their XBOX?