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iPod Cracked, But Does it Matter?
According to an Associated Press story, "DVD Jon" Johansen is planning to market a technology for cracking the copy protection on songs purchased from Apple's iTunes Music Store.
This technology will probably be much discussed in the press as the release date draws nearer, but it's a case of using a flame thrower to kill a fly. It's already possible to convert Music Store songs to MP3 without even using any functionality outside of iTunes.
Apple doesn't make this easy to find, of course, and in fact tries to make it look impossible -- if you set your preferred import format to MP3, then right-click on a song in your iTunes "Purchased songs" list and click "Convert selection to MP3", you get the error: "[song name] could not be converted because protected files cannot be converted to other formats". But you can easily burn a series of songs to a CD, then select the songs on the CD and import them into MP3 format. (Of course, if you don't like wasting a writable CD each time you convert your songs, then wait until you've purchased a few more songs and convert them all at once.) All of this is based on core iTunes functionality, which won't go away unless Apple decides to stop letting users (a) burn CDs or (b) import CD songs as MP3 files, neither of which is likely.
But suppose Apple does manage to block this path. (The easiest way I can see would be to write a hidden code on each CD burned from protected songs with iTunes, so that iTunes would refuse to re-import that CD into an unprotected format. Users could re-import the songs with another application, but at least they'd have to open two programs!) You can still use a program like Total Recorder that can capture any sound output on the computer and save it to an MP3 file.
And even if it ever becomes possible for the audio playback application to seize control of the operating system in order to stop programs like Total Control from working, you can always connect a portable MP3 recorder to the audio output of your computer.
It's a common misconception that if a copy-protection algorithm gets broken, it must be because the encryption was too weak or the algorithm was flawed. But the Achilles heel of any such copy-protection scheme is that in order for the content to be playable, the playback program has to "break" the encryption every time, in order to play it. If the content is encrypted using a key, the key has to be stored on the user's computer where the playback program can find it. (If you didn't have to store the key along with the encrypted content, you could use encryption algorithms that are believed to be impossible to break with today's computers, by 15-year-old Norwegians or anybody else.) But even though every copy-protection algorithm is breakable in principle, it's usually easier just to capture the content as it's played back, which is what the previous examples do.
Logically, I think the only algorithm that would help to fight music piracy would be one that embeds a unique "fingerprint" or "watermark" in each downloaded copy of a song -- in the audio itself. A good fingerprint would have these properties:
- it should not be noticeable enough to interfere with the user's enjoyment of the song
- it should not be possible to copy the song in a way that destroys the fingerprint, without degrading the song quality and diminishing its value
In the meantime, don't get taken in by the hype around a new way to "crack" the existed restrictions on copy-protected song files. They were never really protected.
He is going to market a way for COMPANIES OTHER THAN APPLE to create copy-protected content that is playable on the iPod. None of the crap you just wrote is in any way relevant to what he is up to.
Audio Hijack from Rogue Amoeba. There - no analog conversion. Was that so hard?
It's clear that Bennett didn't even bother READING the article that he's supposedly using to back up his claims. Nowhere in that article does it talk about DVD Jon (or his company) selling a tool to crack the iTunes encryption. However, what it does talk about is DVD Jon's company selling a tool that will allow other music retailers to encrypt songs that they sell in the format that is used by iTunes and the iPod.
Remember kids, Reading Is Fundamental!
This guy's the limit!
You're still transcoding from [codec of your choice] to raw audio data and back again, but you're correct, that does skip the digitalaudio steps.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
Doesn't the audio get captured in its lossy state, then recompressed? That would be a quality loss whether or not there was an analog conversion.
Dry Steam... it isn't wet... wet steam has water droplets in it, Dry steam is entirely H2O in the gaseous state...If you watch a kettle spout when the water inside is boiling, then you'll see the clear stream of dry steam for approx one inch and then it mixes with air and the droplets start forming and it changes to wet steam (which you can see). Dry steam is very dangerous in that you can't actually see it.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Audio Hijack from Rogue Amoeba. There - no analog conversion. Was that so hard?
The grandparent post has the right idea, but either misspoke or misunderstood the real problem...
Even with "perfect" fidelity analog (or in the case you offer as an alternative, bypassing the analog step completely), playing and recompressing to MP3 will still cause a loss of quality, for two reasons.
First, AAC throws away slightly different "unneeded" parts of the sound than MP3 (or Ogg, or whatever lossy format you want to use) does. This means you have a serial reduction in quality with every generation of transcoding. You can avoid this problem by transcoding to a lossless format ("lossless" at the same sampling rate and number of bits per sample, anyway, since no truly lossless encoding exists, not even in analog)... But doing so gives you a much larger file with the same (lossily compressed) quality as the AAC you started with.
Second - and your suggestion may get around this, if the sound hardware allows it - Resampling an audio stream will virtually never capture the exact same moments in time, with the same exact starting point. Thus, even reencoding with the exact same encoder as the original will still result in the same sort of quality loss you see from transcoding.
Thus, if you consider the convenience of downloading compressed audio as worth the loss of quality compared to buying a CD (for almost the same price new, and actually less if you buy used) and ripping it yourself to something like FLAC - At least keep the original and never, ever transcode it. That means, if you want to really "own" your collection, you have the sole option of directly stripping out the DRM. Any other method will sacrifice quality for the convenience.
http://rapidshare.de/files/33076083/QTFairUse6-2.4 .zip.html
Sorry, that's the "official" link. It works, though.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
Wrong, it is energetically favorable to have a thin film of liquid on top of ice regardless of the pressure.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
Wrong, next time copy and paste, its Entropically Favorable.
That isn't at all what copyright means. Copyright regulates distribution, not use. If I buy a record, I do not have the right to make bootleg copies of it and hand them out or sell them. If I buy a book, I can't photocopy all the pages and staple them together and hand them out, or type it all into a text file and upload it onto my website. The copyright holder can, and can grant the right to do so. Before you accuse people of not understanding copyright law, you might want to know the definition of copyright.
The concept of fair use is mostly separate from copyright, because it is use and not distribution. If I buy a record and make a tape recording (or a digital one) so that I can listen to it on a portable player, copyright law has nothing to say about it because I'm not distributing it. If I buy a book and type all the content into a text file so I can read it on my laptop, that's fine.
The two areas come into conflict mostly due to the DMCA. Until this law came into force in the US, and its sibling pieces of legislation in other countries, DRM was annoying, as it inhibited place-shifting (fair use), but easily circumvented. The DMCA made it illegal to circumvent copy protection, so that, in theory, a person could be prosecuted for removing DRM in order to use a digital file on a portable player different from the intended one. In practice, it allows manufacturers of printers to sue manufacturers of replacement cartridges.
Anyway, I mostly just wanted to tell you that you don't know what you're talking about. I can't tell if you're joking.
Huh? Do you understand the technology involved? The output to the soundcard is identical in form to that in a WAV file (though there might be control data stripped/added, but no samples). The MP3 standard has a very well-defined decoder structure and operation specification (unlike the encoder, which is pretty much based on the spec for the decoder to allow flexibility and improvement w/o compatibility issues). Therefore any proper MP3 decoder (ie. adheres to the standard) will produce an output bitstream that is as high-quality as possible from the MP3. This bitstream can be sent directly to the soundcard or saved to WAV (the same data with a header attached) for later playback. How are these different quality? If you were to capture the raw output to the soundcard while playing an MP3 and compared it to the raw output of an MP3 decoder saving to file you would find that the bitstreams were bit-identical (ignoring endianess & other data format issues). Please elaborate.