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Buy DRM-free songs from the iTunes Music Store

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goodcow

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http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000267036571/

Buy DRM-free songs from the iTunes Music Store
Posted Mar 18, 2005, 4:31 AM ET by Peter Rojas
Related entries: Portable Audio

Jon Johansen, aka DVD Jon, aka the secret crush of hackers and DRM-haters everywhere, has struck again. And this time he’s not screwing around, he’s done something that will so seriously provoke Apple and the recording industry that he may have to go into hiding: he’s figured out how to buy DRM-free tracks from the iTunes Music Store. How? With a PyMusique, a new front-end he and some pals/future co-defendants created for the iTunes Music Store that let’s you buy songs without any of that bothersome DRM stuff. Seems that our good friend discovered that when you buy something from the iTMS, the DRM is only added to the tracks after you’ve purchased and downloaded them, which sort of makes sense since they do need to be tagged to your account. You’ll still have to actually pay for the music, but PyMusique conveniently neglects to wrap the file with any copy protection, which means you’re free to do what you want with the unrestricted file, including copying it to multiple machines or sharing it over P2P. Hard to imagine how this could possibly be legal, since Apple specifically requires you to access the iTMS only through their software (Laurie Duncan actually read the ToS and checked), but you may as well enjoy the next six to twelve hours before Apple devises a way lock PyMusique users out.
 

Atari2600

Too dumb for the internet
or you could just burn 80 minutes of songs onto a music CD and then rip them back and not be retarded about the whole situation. But I guess the dude gets off thinking he's a super hacker. Good for him.
 
Atari2600 said:
or you could just burn 80 minutes of songs onto a music CD and then rip them back and not be retarded about the whole situation. But I guess the dude gets off thinking he's a super hacker. Good for him.

Besides the fact that you lose sound quality doing that.
 

Nerevar

they call me "Man Gravy".
too bad you can already do this ...

The thing is, AFAIK, this is perfectly legal. You're breaking the apple TOS, but not the DMCA.
 

Nerevar

they call me "Man Gravy".
keiichi said:
He's pretty good. Wasn't he still a teen when he figured out how to decrypt the stuff on Dvds(css)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Johansen

IIRC, some company left the source code for CSS unprotected on its website. Once it was discovered it was cracked rather quickly.

Edit: And it's worth noting, there is apparently some program out there that already lets you do this (called hymn). His "program" just takes advantage of how Apple downloads music (it applies copy protection AFTER the song has finished downloading - this just captures the stream before the copy protection is applied and saves it). Hymn apparently uses the decryption key stored on your computer to extract the music file. Whether either one is legal is very gray, but it seems like both are legal.
 
Nerevar said:
IIRC, some company left the source code for CSS unprotected on its website. Once it was discovered it was cracked rather quickly.

Edit: And it's worth noting, there is apparently some program out there that already lets you do this (called hymn). His "program" just takes advantage of how Apple downloads music (it applies copy protection AFTER the song has finished downloading - this just captures the stream before the copy protection is applied and saves it). Hymn apparently uses the decryption key stored on your computer to extract the music file. Whether either one is legal is very gray, but it seems like both are legal.
Xing had their decryption key in plain view in their DVD playing software, it wasn't obfuscated in any way at all, and the key was such a short length that they were able to generate many more valid keys, so blocking the key wasnt an option...
 
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