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New Tool Cracks Apple's FairPlay DRM
Posted by
pudge
on Mon Apr 05, 2004 04:52 PM
from the fair-use-shall-win-the-day dept.
from the fair-use-shall-win-the-day dept.
goombah99 writes "PlayFair is an integrated utility that removes the DRM from AAC music files protected by Apple's FairPlay encryption. Information is limited, but the source code is on SourceForge.net and it appears to actually remove the encryption itself and not simply hijack the QuickTime audio stream as earlier methods did. The cracking operation can only be done on songs the user has already has valid licenses for and requires either an iPod or a windows computer for key recovery. If you choose to redistribute these songs you will be violating the contract you bought them under: better hope they aren't watermarked or you might end up paying for releasing one in the wild. To me the authors are vandals not revolutionaries, and may have ensured WMA becomes the standard."
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Lies (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Downloading music does not affect sales. [dailytarheel.com] DRM is only there to appease the record industry, still scared shitless that artists can have direct contact with their fans who still provide them with income. This cuts them out as the middleman. Like the landlord [landandfreedom.org] of times before us, they will be replaced or burnt to the ground. Again, deal with it.
3) The previous two paragraphs are both 'revolutionary' premises. Vandals these coders are not.
Re:Lies (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Lies (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Lies (Score:5, Funny)
That is simply not true. A friend of mine who is a sociologist studied this very phenomenon and found that it didn't exist.
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Re:Lies (Score:5, Insightful)
I wasn't aware the labels were paying the artists a large part of the iTunes income. Anyone you know getting a check from RIAA?
Artists - don't - get - money - from - labels. Artists PAY labels for the privilege of making money for the labels, unless they get more than one gold record, at which point, if they were very careful negotiators, they might actually pay off their creditor and start seeing a royalty stream. Most musicians under a label make the only money they can keep from live performances. If ClearChannel hasn't ripped them off.
The labels, represented by RIAA, are NOT the artists and are NOT their benefactors. Let's stake this meme in the heart. We aren't paying the artists, we're paying the crooks who take advantage of them with their hold on the distribution chain.
Altogether, people:
WHEN WE PAY THE LABELS, WE ARE NOT PAYING THE ARTISTS. WE ARE PAYING DOWN THE DEBT THE ARTISTS OWE THE LABELS, WHICH WOULDN'T EXIST IF THEY HADN'T RAPED THE ARTISTS IN THE FIRST PLACE.
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Re:Lies (Score:5, Insightful)
No such thing. Doesnt' exist.
You can only licence the right to create new copies and derivative copies and to distribute those copies and for public performances. Those are the only licences that exist (at least under US law anyway).
You don't need any licence at all for any sort of fair use.
Apple's DRM is pretty benign... They worked out a lot of rights for their customers.
It doesn't matter WHAT rights that "worked out". The fact is that ALL fair use is perfectly legal and legitimate, and a copyright holder has absolutely no legal right to say squat when I make fair use.
Unauthorized use and unauthorized copies are perfectly legal and legitimate when they are fair use.
-
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Re:Lies (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair use relates to things that would have been covered by copyright; derivative works, quoting, etc. They're allowed, even though technically they're a little bit of the 'copying and redistribution' that copyright is supposed to regulate.
Unregulated use relates to things that have nothing to do with "copying", and should never have been covered. Transfering a work 'I own' into another format, playing a DVD on a non-standard platform, etc. If I bought the work, I should have the right to do anything I want short of making copies and giving them to my friends. Playing DVD's under Linux, converting AAC's into MP3's, etc -should- all be unregulated uses. It's none of the copyright-holders business what I do with the disc after I bought it, unless they can PROVE that I'm redistributing unauthorised copies!
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Re:Lies (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. If it's on my hard drive, which is a physical platter that I purchased at retail, then it's a physical thing that exists in the real world and it's mine. You're telling me my hard drive is mine but its contents aren't? I don't buy that for a second, whatever some RIAA lackey wants to say to convince me. If it somehow found a way (legally) into my house and onto my hard drive, it belongs to nobody else but me, and as long as I keep it for myself, I'm allowed to do whatever I damn well please with it.
In fact, DRM exists because copyright holders know this. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a need for DRM! The whole point of DRM is to keep you from doing things you are legally entitled to do as specifically written in copyright law. The RIAA does not like the way copyright law is written so they are doing their best to usurp it with DRM (which they seem to think gains them additional protections under the DMCA that they don't otherwise have under regular old copyright law). I see no problem in breaking DRM in order to exercise my legal rights.
Now, as for this sob story about WMA becoming a "standard" because of this... I mean really, cry me a river. Neither AAC nor WMA will ever be considered a "standard". The only thing close to a "standard" is MP3 (only because so many people have already ripped their music to it, so every piece of hardware has to support it) and it obviously isn't used for many applications where real compression efficiency or the best absolute sound quality are required. MP3 will always be around - I'm sure not about to re-rip all 2,000 or so CD's I own, and doubt many others will either - so whatever gets declared a "standard" for any specific use doesn't really matter anyway.
WMA's DRM will be broken in time just as FairPlay apparently has been, in any case. It's the nature of digital data. Anything that's expressed in bits can and will be cracked, so WMA has no advantage here. Eventually these companies will hopefully accept that all DRM is doomed to fail, and just go back to allowing their customers to exercise their rights under the law, as they used to do many years ago.
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Re:Lies (Score:5, Insightful)
I own a lot of books. The paper, the ink, the glue - I own those, uncontested. I own that instance of the book. I can lend that particular book to a friend, I can sell it to someone, I can throw it in the trash, put it in a barbequeue, whatever. I can take the book down to Kinko's, photocopy it and write all over the photocopies. But if the book is still in copyright, I can't legally give those photocopies to someone else, nor can I legally typeset it, publish a new edition, and start selling it. Even though those words are physical objects in my possession.
More bull. Companies pushing DRM don't give a damn whether you make copies for yourself, they just want to make sure you don't upload it to the net and share it with a few thousand of your closest friends. And it's easier for them to prevent you from doing anything than it is to only prevent you from handing out free copies everywhere. That's why most DRM is so draconian - not because they want to lock you into only listening in one room, but because they just don't care.
Apple at least made an effort to compromise.
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Re:Lies (Score:5, Informative)
Quit yer trolling...who said anything about violating copyright laws? If I'm working on my car and want to refer to some pages out of the shop manual, I'll make a copy of the relevant pages and work from those so the manual doesn't get dirtied up. That is fair use. Another example of fair use is dubbing a CD to tape so I can play it in my car (which doesn't have a CD player). That's also fair use. How, then, is stripping the DRM off an .m4p so I can convert it to Ogg Vorbis for playback on my Palm (an example of format-shifting analogous to the aforementioned CD-to-tape dub) not fair use? It's only copyright infringement if I turn around and put the resulting .m4a files up on $P2P_NETWORK or otherwise distribute them to others.
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Re:Lies (Score:5, Insightful)
End of story, no "ifs" "ands" or "buts" about this license restriction crap.
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Re:Lies (Score:5, Insightful)
Great. Sounds like you've found something that is still more restrictive than WMA music, but you're happy with it.
Besides, I can buy MP3s from anywhere else. Oh wait. Who sells those?
http://www.magnatune.com/ [magnatune.com] for starters.
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Re:Lies (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh... said player needs to work on most any Unix I care to throw at it. No Rube Goldberg devices, no tricky hacks.
(I don't think those "bum the win32 codecs" players are going to cut it, either. Something that'll natively play it is what I'm seeking. My point is that WMA is not cross-platform to the extent that mp3 is.)
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Re:Lies (Score:5, Informative)
I think part of the problem is that folks are looking at AAC as 'Apple's format.' It's not. AAC -- Advanced Audio Coding -- is an open standard; there's an ISO number for it, and it was come up with by the MPEG standards group. AAC is to MPEG4 what MP3 (MPEG1 Audio Layer 3) was to the original MPEG. AAC itself is quite widely played by software players -- more than just iTunes -- and is more or less the intended successor to MP3. (NOTE: Intended. I make no predictions about whether or not it will actually happen.)
Where you can point the finger at Apple is on their DRM implementation on top of AAC; that's not part of the AAC specification, and so means that while an un-protected AAC file can play on iTunes, WinAmp, etc., a protected iTunes Music Store one cannot. THIS is a little unfortunate; I'd love to be able to load protected AAC onto my NetMD minidisc player without having to burn it to CD first.
WMA makes me more nervous as a format, because as far as I know it's controlled by a single entity (Microsoft) instead of an open group (MPEG standards group). However, it can't be discounted that WMA's integration of DRM has made it the more attractive commercial option for folks, since it's possible to make differing players handle the same DRM-protected files.
Whether or not AAC with some form of DRM will catch on remains to be seen, I guess.
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Re:Lies (Score:5, Informative)
In theory, anyone who wanted could use the FairPlay DRM and thus play Apple iTunes Music Store music. However, AAC not having an inherent DRM seems to have discouraged everyone but Apple from using it commercially, whereas WMA has the DRM right there so if you're using WMA you don't have to go shopping for separate DRM solutions.
That was the point I attempted to make in the earlier post.
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Re:Lies (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Lies (Score:5, Insightful)
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We can only hope WMA will win! (Score:5, Insightful)
And then a code monky from Argentina will be codeing at 3am and have a Mountain Dew inspired breakthrough, and WMA will be broken wide open forever.
Software companies continue to forget the days of dongles, code wheeles, and manual page/paragraph/word lookups. All it will do is annoy real consumers.
Re:We can only hope WMA will win! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:We can only hope WMA will win! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm of the mind that the genie can't be put back - that open hardware will prevail, DRM will fail, and that alternative means of funding digital works will emerge such as variations on the street performer protocol [firstmonday.dk], where it's the SCARCE act of creation that is funded, rather than the zero marginal cost of reproducing abundant old data.
--
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Monkey See, Monkey Do (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with incredibly clever people is inevitably they come up with something you don't want. Who's to say they weren't WMA or even (shudder) RIAA proponents, bent on showing the public can't be trusted and DMCA is the right approach?
I agree that they are vandals and scoundrels... (Score:5, Troll)
ALL technological barriers can be subverted. It just takes the proper motivation, be it economic, political or otherwise.
I'll stick with purchasing tracks on iTMS. I love my iPod, iTunes and the quality and economical service Apple provides.
Vandals (Score:5, Funny)
Vandal (van'dl)
1. vandal One who willfully or maliciously defaces or destroys public or private property.
2. A member of a Germanic people that overran Gaul, Spain, and northern Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. and sacked Rome in 455.
As these people obviously have not maliciously defaced or destroyed public or private property, I can only assume, then, that the repeated references to them as "vandals" means that the FBI has identified the coders as coming from an obscure Germanic sect, whose culture was believed lost.
Which leads to a conundrum. If we don't arrest these people, then we are validating the viewpoint that the DMCA is far overreaching. If we do arrest these people, then we are destroying the remnants of a lost civilization important to our shared cultural heritage.
Declare a law overly broad, or destroy a valuable culture? What is Ashcroft to do?
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Re:I agree that they are vandals and scoundrels... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is nonsense. Encryption systems may be practically uncrackable. Encryption systems that have to decrypt the "protected" contents for you so that you can listen to them will never be in the least bit secure. If you can hear it you can record it. There is no getting around this. The entire idea of DRM is, on the face of it, futile.
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Let's hope (Score:5, Funny)
Is FairPlay really better than WMA? (Score:5, Insightful)
If DRM is offensive to you, than FairPlay is no better than WMA.
If you don't particularly mind DRM, then what's your complaint about WMA? I think it is the iTunes contract you like, and not FairPlay itself.
DeCSS (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a good thing.
I think this is good (Score:5, Insightful)
Incorrect background on VeriDisc/FairPlay (Score:5, Informative)
Apple bought VeriDisc. They didn't license FairPlay; they own it.
This is like a selling point (Score:5, Insightful)
Legalities - FairPlay hacking is illegal (Score:5, Informative)
It is just as illegal. Actually, more so. Downloading copyrighted music is simple a copyright infringment. (at the moment) This means it falls under civil law.
However, creating a tool like this circumvents a copyright protection scheme. This is a criminal act punishable by up to 5 years in prison or $500,000, under the DMCA of 1998. (section 1201)
As an aside you mention if Apple had it's way...Even at the risk of appearing as an Apple apologist...Apple didn't want DRM at all. They struck a deal with the RIAA. Essentially the RIAA said, NO DRM, NO MUSIC. Apple said, okay...we'll put in a little DRM. I wish I could find the quote from Steve Jobs but he essentially said, "DRM is stupid, users want control of their files and rightly so, DRM will kill the market."
Parent
Largely irrelevant. (Score:5, Interesting)
The cracking operation can only be done on songs the user has already has valid licenses for and requires either an iPod or a windows computer for key recovery.
Let's emphasize this part. You still have to go through the trouble of downloading it, compiling it, and using it on your own songs. I don't see many people doing this just to share them over a P2P network.
There would be a problem if this was something that could decrypt other's songs. If you do a search there are people sharing m4p files on filesharing networks (mainly because they just share their music library) and so the ability to then download those files and decrypt them would be more serious. As it stands with this program, I have to go through that for my own files, which I wouldn't go through the trouble of doing unless FairPlay got in my way, which it doesn't.
Even then, however, I suspect it would not be a major concern. Apple expected this kind of thing and has a philosophy that most people will pay for their service regardless of if they can get it free elsewhere--simply because they will pay for quality and service.
watermarking? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a GUI (Score:5, Insightful)
fairplay CVS is still up (Score:5, Informative)
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot
What's the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Think of it as the same thing as cracking a game you already bought so that you don't have to put the CD in the drive every time you want to play it.
Beware, downloaded songs are watermarked (Score:5, Informative)
Besides, CD quality is still better audio.
Wow, whats with all the hoopla? (Score:5, Insightful)
Vandals? Really? Wow, because the first thing that came to my mind is: wow, I can unencrypt MY files and put them on my MythTV box, or trascode them to use in my cars mp3 player or send them through my Slimplayer. People are getting a little weird about DRM. Vandals is probably the most ridiculous thing I've hear yet. Itunes is great, but if we are going to continue to have fair use we are going to have to stop buying in to all the hype and realize that using a product we bought isn't criminal. I'm a fucking consumer, not a pirate.
Fair use... (Score:5, Interesting)
All the Kazaa-using pirate assholes and those cracking Fairplay are doing is making my life harder and as time goes on, interfering more and more with what can be considered fair use.
You all need to consider what is cause and what is effect here. Was there DRM before Napster? Nope. So this is all a reaction to your sleazoid thievery and it just royally pisses me off.
As DRM goes, Fairplay is by far the best of a bad lot. Its compromises I can live with. What are you assholes going to make Apple come up with next?
Is this Slashdot or New York Times? (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting. Good point. So why was this allowed in reporting the story?
This belongs in the comment section, to be moderated fairly, like my little opinion and other people's comments.
Re:What was the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What was the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the guy who did this project is like me. He needed to something with AAC that "FairPlay" wasn't allowing him to do, so he found a way around it. Or maybe he was just being a geek and wanted to see if it could be done.
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Re:What was the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What was the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
This line of reasoning drives me crazy. For the last 20 years we have had an open, digital, non-DRM music standard which has succeded wildly. And yet now people are constantly praising FairPlay, because it is the least restrictive of the new DRM schemes. I am supposed to be happy that we have only taken one step back instead of two? To be fair it is worse than a step backwards, because it is introducing restrictions that have never existed before. FairPlay is not the best DRM - no DRM is the best DRM.
But you are right on one thing. What is the point of buying music under terms that you don't agree with? If you don't like DRM, then don't buy DRM'd music. At least now you still have the option. If consumers continue to be so eager to support these new formats, that option won't exist for very long.
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Re:FoulPlay (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the thing you and many others are missing - PlayFair only strips the DRM if you already own a legal copy. If you read so much as the single paragraph summary on their site, you'd see that in order crack the DRM, PlayFair extracts your key from either your iPod or your iTunes software. So if you don't already have legal access to the music, you're not going to be able to strip the DRM.
Yes, it can be used as a piracy tool, but really the argument for this isn't really any different than the one for DeCSS. This can be, and very much is, a tool for fair use.
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Re:FoulPlay (Score:5, Informative)
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So maybe it's not secure... (Score:5, Insightful)
What if sales of music in this format increase, because people are more likely to buy songs they can use as they please instead of buying songs that have annoying DRM restrictions on them?
The bad assumption here is that by removing DRM, people won't want to buy a product, because they'll just copy it instead of paying for it. The problem with that assumption is it ignores the fact that copying itself has a cost, even if it's not a financial one: You both have to have a copy of what you want to make a copy of, and you then have to actually distribute that copy to whoever actually wants it.
Or you could just go to a central store of digital copies, pay your paltry 99 cents, and get your own copy. For most people, 99 cents is worth the convenience of having whatever they want on demand.
Before you start thinking this won't work, look at DVD sales nowadays. VHS tapes were priced to cost many, many times more than the price of a rental. Rentals were attractive. DVD's are priced at about $20-$30 each. Result? Even though people could fairly easy copy DVDs if they REALLY wanted to, it's just "easier" to walk into Best Buy and plop down the $20 - so much so that many many more people buy DVD's than used to buy VHS tapes.
For most people, trying to find and download a copy of something off the internet just isn't worth the $20 to buy the copy at Best Buy, or the $20/month to have Netflix mail it to you.
Very little of the cost/value of content is the content itself - most of it is the distribution. Efficient distribution can distribute content at prices low enough to be competitive with comparatively inefficient illegal distribution while still creating enough revenue to pay content providers.
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Re:So maybe it's not secure... (Score:5, Insightful)
> of buying songs that have annoying DRM restrictions on them?
Let's think this through. What if they do?
Then the RIAA claims that Apple is in violation of their licensing terms. They could ask Apple to rewrite FairPlay, which I think is unlikely because it'll just get cracked again, given the way quicktime works. (I suspect, though I'm not certain, that I could have written a crack for this myself, because I know how QuickTime's guts work.)
They could impose some much more restrictive DRM scheme on iTunes. This is the way I suspect they'd go.
They could let things go on the way they are. I think that unlikely.
Or they could just pull Apple's license altogether.
Before you see this as a good thing, it might be wise to wonder which they'll do?
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Re:Not Apple's problem (Score:5, Insightful)
So it's been cracked. Does this affect the massive quantity of illegal MP-3's out there in the least? No. If you needed a copy of a song that was on iTMS, you could always find it elsewhere if you weren't worried about copyrights.
I use iTMS because of:
- Download speed
- Gauranteed Results
- Gauranteed Quality
- Ease of use
The DRM affects me not in the least. I have no reason to crack what I've bought from iTMS, and won't do so.Parent
Re:The author implies that... (Score:5, Insightful)
So f'ing what? Seriously. You gloom and doom types are overlooking the patently obvious here: without iTunes, what's left? KaZaA, Gnutella, etc. Shut down iTunes and you drive all those consumers right back to the free (and illegal) services, including the ones currently in the works that encrypt data across multiple nodes and make it nearly impossible to track downloaders. It's not like there's no other way to download music (and if you want it legally, it's not like there's no other way to buy it besides downloading). And let's not forget that it's legal to share music in Canada!
Shuttering iTunes is not in the record industry's best interests. Oh, they still may not realize it, but they will eventually or they will die. What is in their best interests is to simply let this go. Don't publicize it. Let the Slashdot crowd break the DRM on the tunes they've purchased; they're not the ones downloading music on KaZaA anyway. Sue more people who are sharing illegally and drive them to iTunes.
Alternative strategy is to try to shut this software down with a massive legal and PR blitz. Won't work, but it'll put the fear into a few people, at least. But shutting down iTunes does not seem to be an option in any case. It would be suicidal. It's not as if alternatives don't exist, that cost less (ie. free) and don't have DRM. Why push customers back to that at the very moment you seem to be educating them on the benefits of actually paying for music?
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