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Apple will likely patch both the iPod and iTunes for Windows to remove this hole, at which time the actual DRM scheme currently in place will again be uncrackable for a while longer. Update: technically speaking, this is not a "crack" in the usual sense of the term, since the encryption is not truly defeated, but rather circumvented by obtaining the key which is normally used to decode the music. The Harvard study was very interesting, and clears up a number of complete misconceptions while also highlighting a number of areas where things are not entirely clear. If you haven't had a chance to read my report on Harvard Law's Fair Use study using the iTunes Music Store as an example, I highly recommend it. It's curious that the second half was left off the front page of their SourceForge site, however. In a way, this says a lot about the perils of treating everything other than humans as entities with as much (if not more) legal rights and desires as people themselves. The answer then may lie somewhere other than EULAs and DRM wrappers.įinally, I should note that at the end of the included README file, you find an interesting logical impossibility. The stronger argument to be made is that DMCA-backed DRM technology will never solve the problem of piracy, as schemes will likely be crackable in perpetuity. It's naive to believe that WMA won't also be cracked, however, but that doesn't mean that the music industry won't make unreflective decisions.
It could be argued that Microsoft's WMA now looks strikingly stronger, as it has yet to be cracked for any length of time.
Those of you who have sent this in have asked many important questions, including whether or not this crack poses a serious threat to Apple's continued success. It must also be noted that the crack will not work in OS X unless you also have an iPod.
Of course, one may then distribute (illegally in the US) the song to others, but this limitation is significant. For the most part, this means that you can only remove the DRM from songs that you already have the rights to, by purchasing them from the iTunes Music Store. To begin, because of the way it obtains the key to perform the original decoding, you can only crack files for which you have the right key. The crack is a little more Apple-friendly than you might think (though probably not by design). It then optionally copies the metadata tags that describe the song, including the cover art, to the new file. It takes one of the iTMS Protected AAC Audio Files, decodes it using a key obtained from your iPod or Microsoft Windows system and then writes the new, decoded version to disk as a regular AAC Audio File. So what will playfair do for you? The playfair program is quite simple. Cleverly named PlayFair, the "crack" ups the ante in the anti-piracy fight, but there's a few twists. Now another group has quasi-cracked the DRM scheme by essentially taking this method to the next level, making it easily breakable for almost anyone who cares to engage in such practices. Earlier this year, DVD Jon of DeCSS fame created an application called QTFairUse that would dump encrypted AAC from system memory to a new file, essentially removing Apple's FairPlay DRM.