Cracking iTunes' DRM with JHymn 449
comforteagle writes "Howard Wen has interviewed 'FutureProof' of the JHymn project, a DRM removal application for iTunes song files laden, or 'crippled' as some say, to prevent filesharing. FutureProof tells us how Apple's DRM works, how to rip it out using JHymn, how they build on the work of 'DVD' Jon Johansen, and how to upgrade to that brand new iShuffle safely."
I love this shit (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's digital, and the end user can see / hear it, it can be copied. Perfectly. Deal with it, and make it interesting to buy instead of pirating.
Why crack it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Admittedly, without the thrill of "fighting the man", but in this case "the man" is giving you virtually everything you asked for (inexpensive music you can try before you buy with the ability to download exactly what you want and make mix CDs, which you could then rip as well without needing this tool.) Now Apple is going to have to crack down again.
What does this win us? The music industry can point to this as another example of why the restrictions need to be in the hardware and the hardware manufacturers are already in their pocket as far as the next generation of motherboards are concerned. Thanks to the pirates, those of us who buy the stuff again have to pay with further restrictions.
Re:I love this shit (Score:3, Insightful)
i don't know the proper way to deal with it. but i can see why DRM is being used. i don't think it's as black and white as, "it'll never work, so just quit it."
Prevent filesharing? (Score:2, Insightful)
or crippled files to prevent me from doing whatever I want with the files I BOUGHT, thankyouverymuch. I don't share, I don't pirate, but I demand total freedom when it comes to changing from one's format to another.
Re:Why crack it? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wasn't aware you were able to get custom made mix CDs at stores with tracks numbering in the 100s of thousands. Cool.
Obviously iTunes is popular because some people don't like to spend $13+ on an entire album when they only want one song. They want to make their own mixes and still not have DRM on them I guess.
Re:You know... (Score:1, Insightful)
I know you're joking, but that's just plain stealing! you're physically taking property from the store without paying for it. at least if you download it illegally, nobody loses anything (assuming that you wouldn't buy it otherwise, i know i don't at the high prices that some of these CDs sell at)
Re:I love this shit (Score:4, Insightful)
You just can't keep digital media from being pirated. It's as simple as that. Try a different aproach.
For example, i like buying CDs. I like having a nice, pressed, shiny CD with a good looking booklet. I like buying books, and i like buying DVDs.
I also download a lot, even though i usually end up buying what i really like. I would buy a lot more, but the thing is, music/dvds and even books are still way too expensive. Why not lowering the price, knowing that you'll still make a profit? (no, i don't beleive $20 for a CD is reasonable)
Re:You know... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You know... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's got nothing to do with either law or morality. It's just got to do with how far you're willing to delude yourself. Is that it?
FairPlay LIMITS sharing, doesn't prevent it (Score:4, Insightful)
You can also burn any iTunes track to CD. Only limit is you can only burn 5 copies of a playlist before you have to change the songs in the playlist. Which means if you or your friend spring for the cost of a CD, you can share any song you like, as many times as you like, with whomever you like, just like other physical media.
I think that's a super middle-ground. Steve Jobs has discussed MANY times that DRM will be cracked, but FairPlay is pretty good. Apple puts a sticker on all their iPods that says, "Please don't steal music." Please point me to a better approach to DRM or filesharing scheme. Yes, DRM sucks, but it's not going anywhere if you want to use downloaded RIAA music.
iTunes set the best standard (Score:5, Insightful)
They forget that Apple has SET THE STANDARD for sensible DRM that is reasonable for the consumer.
I've been around a long time, and have seen plenty of stupid stuff. Divx (in the DVD space) moved things back, lawsuits and claims about the mp3 format itself, a joke.
But I've also got a sense of history. Before apple came along legal online music was GHASTLY.
You think iTunes is "laden" and "crippled" with DRM? People have forgotten that before apple came along there was a fragmented music space with DRM that meant you couldn't move songs between computers, burn them to CD's, and stores run by companies that were no fun to do business with. Subs, if you canceled, your music vanished.
For most folks, fairplay is actually fair. Most people don't end up playing on more then five computers. Unlimited burns of a song, and seven burns of a specific CD are reasonably fair. The authorization process isn't terribly painful.
Remember, the RIAA used to claim on their dumb soundbyting site that making a tape copy of a CD was copyright infringment. And they were probably right, it was.
The one big issues with iTunes are lack of open source support (tricky, but they should do better here) and the lock-in to iPods as the portable music player for the service. The issue is that software needs to provide the DRM. Luckily for apple they've got a reasonable ipod product. This lockin will have to evolve though of course, open source and linux are not supported so far.
But from a DRM perspective, they really moved the industry forward. If the media companies had their way we'd be stuck with Sony's ATRAC format.
So, complaints and props to apple.
Re:apple zealots - start your engines (Score:3, Insightful)
If it weren't for Apple's DRM on the music sold through the iTMS, there would be no iTMS. No way to buy that one track you like. No way to support the artists that deserve the support. None at all.
Your turn.
Re:Why crack it? (Score:3, Insightful)
1 - Because the CD probably has DRM on it too, these days.
2 - Because even if you get a non-DRMed CD, eventually, someday, downloaded music may become the normal way to buy music, and CDs will go the way of the vinyl LP.
Either way, you're going to need a way to get rid of the DRM so that you can listen to your own music as you see fit.
Re:You know... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You know... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's got nothing to do with either law or morality. It's just got to do with posting flamebaits and being smug. Is that it?
Re:Why crack it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should I buy an entire CD when I can buy the two or three songs I want via a brillant interface that's better than any other online music service? And its not a hassle. One-time setup of account, 99c a song and a quick run of Jhymn is hardly a hassle.
"but in this case "the man" is giving you virtually everything you asked for (inexpensive music you can try before you buy with the ability to download exactly what you want and make mix CDs, which you could then rip as well without needing this tool.) "
So circumventing Apple's DRM one way is okay but another way isn't? Wow, great logic. Let me ask, if I record to a tape from my audio out of a DRM file is that illegal as well? If the end result is the same what's the difference? Who is being harmed when the end result in a unencrypted file in EVERY SINGLE CASE. What because your taking the extra step of going DRM-CD-RIP and someone else goes DRM-RIP your method is somehow better for Apple? In what way? Why are you even suggesting Burning and Ripping? Are you one of those people who upload all of your Itunes music to P2P? Oh no wait, that's what you Apple defenders are constantly accusing us paying customers of doing.
"What does this win us? The music industry can point to this as another example of why the restrictions need to be in the hardware and the hardware manufacturers are already in their pocket as far as the next generation of motherboards are concerned"
Or they could point to the built in loophole of ripping from CD which rendered Apples DRM useless from day one.
"Thanks to the pirates,"
Excuse me? Pirates? Who? The people who PAID APPLE for each and every song and use a program which ONLY works if your the one who purchased the music in the first place? Yea those bastards!
The Pirates are on P2P sharing songs they never bought. The people using this tool aren't pirates. Get it straight already. And get over your holier than thou, how you dare use a product in a way other then intended attitude. You've benefitted more from reverse engineering and people using products in ways not intended then you could possibly imagine.
Shill or just don't care about your rights? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you give up control, you get what you deserve.
Re:Prevent filesharing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nothing, just as he's done for months now (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it was really annoying that Apple did that -- the entire reason for that uniqueness was to discourage copyright infringement by putting up a big red flag saying "this song was came from ITMS." Combined with the fact that it (still, hopefully) leaves the Apple user ID the hope was that Apple would sue copyright infringers (like the RIAA, only with an accurate way to tell who's infringing). Instead, Apple forced them to remove the feature, which was stupid because it was in Apple's own best interests to have it there in the first place!
I wouldn't call it a "fix;" I would call it a "regrettably necessary workaround of Apple's stupidity."
Just FYI, there are several programs (for example, Leechster) that allow people to download from iTunes shares instead of just stream. It's still not in the same league as Kazaa, since you have to be in close physical (or logical, in the case of VPNs) proximity to use it, though.
"Sensible DRM" Sensible to Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if Apple licensed Fairplay playback to device manufactures and software developers, that might change people's opinion but as it stands now, Apple computer has a monopoly of fairplay enabled music playback. I would suggest that Apple open Fairplay, but as we all know, the concept of DRM is simply PKI turned upside down. Its a game of digital hide and seek or "security by obscurity," so it is simply not possible to open source any software based DRM scheme.
Lets look at this situation from another angle, if Microsoft was the leading online music retailer and used a format that could only be played back on Microsoft hardware and software products, would people be defending them? The hypocrisy and denial of Apple fanboys on /. is so blatant, its not even amusing anymore.
Re:Why crack it? (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh -- except that even though I have a backup of the drive, I still can't play the music on my other system: a linux box.
This incident taught me a valuable lesson: de-DRM-ify your music immediately, then back it up!
Re:You know... (Score:3, Insightful)
From the point of view of the RIAA, downloading MP3s is worse than stealing CDs because it implies you are participating in the global piracy rings called P2P services, and probably committing thousands of copyright infringements automatically as people download files from you. While stealing CDs is bad, it doesn't scale the way P2P does.
From the point of view of many Slashdotters, downloading MP3s is better than stealing CDs because they believe the concept of enforcing artificial scarcity for intellectual property is misguided when in reality there is no such scarcity. Stealing CDs is still bad, because CDs are physical objects and thus scarce by nature.
By now you probably think I side with the Slashdotters. Actually lately I have been leaning toward the RIAA (slightly). I can see that enforcing scarcity on IP does provide incentives to produce it; thus encouraging the production of more and higher quality IP (i.e. Hollywood movies, big-name computer games). Without that enforced scarcity, many of the incentives (i.e. $$$) go away, and it is hard for me to see how IP of the quality we have today would continue to be produced. Maybe Windows could be replaced by Linux, but the LOTR movie trilogy, Doom III, World of Warcraft, etc are not like Linux. I would be very sad to see a world which could not produce them.
Crippled is the wrong word. (Score:2, Insightful)
"Crippled" is when something isn't working the way it was intended. Songs from the iTunes Music store work the way they are supposed to. If you don't want DRM laden music, don't buy it.
Re:Why crack it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Dude, it's the grossly underpaid engineers who hit the buttons on Pro Tools.
The "big name" producers usually sit on the couch and go "I don't know, what do you think."*
*Yes, there are exceptions, but not many.
Re:iTunes set the best standard (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why crack it? (Score:1, Insightful)
If you read some of the comments in the hymn source code there is an explaination why it was developed. The jist of it is that the crack was developed to show how worthless DRM really is when it comes to protecting content. As for hassles, it a bigger hassle to get the CD. You have to either goto the store and buy it order online, and you end up paying for song you don't want. If you want to use the CD with portable you have to rip the songs. It's less of a hassle to setup and account, buy, download the music, and run hymn on it which leaves you with a standard unprotected AAC file. Using the CD as you suggest takes alot longer than using iTunes and hymn. DRM keeps honest people honest while providing only a slight challenge to those who want to pirate the content. DRM actually gives more incentives to get a pirate copy because you can do anything to the pirate copy, no asking for permission.
"Admittedly, without the thrill of "fighting the man", but in this case "the man" is giving you virtually everything you asked for (inexpensive music you can try before you buy with the ability to download exactly what you want and make mix CDs, which you could then rip as well without needing this tool.)"
I am not sure how inexpensive iTunes is. When they start selling losslessly compressed tunes for 99 cents I consider it. Your paying a buck for a track that's lossy compressed and at a substainually lower bit rate than a song on a CD. Why would I want to burn a CD, rip, and degrade the quality even more?
"Now Apple is going to have to crack down again."
Apple seems to have given up. The only way Apple is going to defeat hymn is change the DRM and/or the file format, creating a big hassle for them and their users. Even then I suspect their victory will be short lived. They can try and win in court, but the source code has been out for a while so I suspect that would go about as well as the DVD-CCA's attempt at stopping DeCSS(which is still widely avaliable. The Gallery CSS Descramblers comes to mind. Thank to Dr. David S. Touretzky, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University).
"What does this win us? The music industry can point to this as another example of why the restrictions need to be in the hardware and the hardware manufacturers are already in their pocket as far as the next generation of motherboards are concerned."
No one said you had to buy one. You get to vote with your wallet what technology you buy into. As far as embedding DRM in the hardware goes, look at modern game consoles. All the major consoles have DRM that prevents the console from playing games that have been copied or altered. In every case someone has found away around it. There are hacks one can perform on the Xbox, PS2, and Gamecube that will bypass these protection systems. Game consoles are very closed and proprietary compared to a PC. Before any hardware DRM can be used it has to have away to recognise protected content and find the rights associated with said content, which usually mean something in the file. For example, someone might find away to alter the rights assigned to given peace of protected content and it only takes one hacked copy. The point is there is no such thing as a secure system. DRM as technology is fundamentally flawed. The only reason DRM has been as successful as it has been is because it's been propped up by laws and even that hasn't stopped determined people from cracking it. The content industries best hope is to give people more incentives to buy the original than to get a pirated copy. These mean they need to quite punishing the people who do buy the original with ineffective DRM schemes that serves only to fustrate legit consumers.
Re:You know... (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't give a damn about your moral system until you try and impose it on me, e.g., use the government to force me to pay you money to do stuff with my own private property that I would ordinarily be able to do for free.
As far as "God-given property rights" are concerned, even if I weren't agnostic, I'd dearly love to hear you quote the Scriptures which define ideas as property, especially since a great deal of the Scriptures emphasize getting their own message distributed as widely as possible.
Patent and copyrights don't have _anything_ to do with private property, and have everything to do with greedy people who have a greatly-self-inflated idea of the worth of their own ideas trying to force people to give them money they don't deserve.
Re:Why crack it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, the people who paid, still pay, and continue to pay for it? Big-evil-corporations exist because people pay them money. Nobody needs music on CDs/records/tapes, or encoded in mp3s. Nobody has a right to it. The only rights involved are those of the creator and of those to whom he delegates his rights.
Nobody forces an artist to sign a contract with a big label. They do it of their own free will, generally because of greed. They aren't content with having their "real" jobs, playing at local venues when they aren't working to pay rent, perhaps growing popular through word of mouth. They want to "hit it big" and think they need the power of an agent/label/distributor/so-on. Such is their right.
That a work of art should have protection against copying was an obvious and fundamental enough concept that our ancestors enshrined it in the Constitution of the United States as an explicit obligation of the Congress to enforce, over two hundred years ago, when music was sold via lyric sheet. The mental product of your fellow man has value, and is worthy of legal protection. Regarding DRM, finding some clever way to open a vault and remove the gold within makes it no less theft. Finding clever ways around DRM to extract the protected work within makes the act no less theft.
Nobody has the right to music, or software, cable TV or for that matter health care. Something that requires the labor of another is not a right. To believe otherwise is to believe that others must labor uncompensated (see: slavery) for oh-so-special you. If you don't like the price being charged, if you don't like the terms of the sale (usage restrictions), don't buy it, and don't steal it. Something that is worth stealing is worth protecting. You know that, they know that.
It's very simple. If enough people cut restricted/expensive music out of their lives entirely, the market will adapt.
Larry
Re:I love this shit (Score:4, Insightful)
"So why bother a paying user if your product is going to be pirated anyway? It's a battle you can't win; you might as well accept it as a price of doing buisness."
Accepting it is not the same as not taking measures to reduce it. Ask any retailer; they'll tell you that there's always going to be a certain amount of shoplifters, but rather than simply give up trying to fight it, retailers put anti-shoplifting measures into place. These, too, can bother paying users, but retailers have evidently done careful analysis to understand that it's worth the tradeoff. Case in point: Costco (or whatever your local club store is) has chosen the route of inspecting your reciept on the way out, rather than just simply giving up and "accepting" shoplifting. Perhaps Slashdot users know better, but I doubt it. It's a complex situation that cannot be resolved with simple bromides such as "piracy will happen, so give up on DRM."
"I also download a lot, even though i usually end up buying what i really like. I would buy a lot more, but the thing is, music/dvds and even books are still way too expensive. Why not lowering the price, knowing that you'll still make a profit? (no, i don't beleive $20 for a CD is reasonable)."
Huh? CDs haven't been $20 in years, and prices have been falling rapidly. The average price of a new CD dropped 4% last year [bandradio.com], to $12.95. The record companies are way ahead of you on this one.
I've lost you on the "knowing you'll still make a profit" part, though. The record industry gets by with pretty shitty margins in general, and many CDs lose money.
intended by whom? (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't say "works as intended" to a user of the songs, because their intent is different than the DRM designers. DRM is never built to help the customer in any way, only to restrict end-user rights.
Re:"Sensible DRM" Sensible to Who? (Score:2, Insightful)
"I love reading posts from Apple fanboys who fail to see the problem with a DRM standard that locks playback to portable devices that our produced by the same company that distributes the music."
It's certainly not a problem for Apple. Their players have an ungodly market share, and I am certain that their strategy of locking the iTMS to iPods has helped. They make a much higher margin on iPod sales than they do music sales.
To put this in perspective, we're talking about music downloads and MP3 players, here. There are a squillion download sites, and a squillion makers of MP3 players. Apple's strategy is paying off for them; that's all that counts. If one doesn't like the way they do this, there are plenty of other options available.
Re:iTunes set the best standard (Score:3, Insightful)
Well yeah. The RIAA cartel abused it's monopoly power to suppress any legal download market at all for what, half a decade? They imposed a market vacuum. Hell, they created the P2P explosion. Huge market demand, and a conspiracy to create a market vacuum. And markets abhorr a vacuum just as much as nature. Of course a gray/black market exploded to fill that artificial vacuum.
And after years of countless companies dying to serve the online market, they finally conspired to impose oppressive terms and insane prices. Including DRM. And there is no way DRM can survive in a market except through suppression of competition. Nobody preffers a crippled product. People want to buy MP3's. Had any of the companies allowed MP3 sales they would have absolutely stopped the competition and won alomst total market share online.
And you want to know WHY Apple's DRM is slightly less oppressive than any of the others? Because the RIAA desperately needed Apple on board to avoide getting nailed for anti-trust violation. The RIAA had conspired to impose exactly identical oppressive terms on all of the other music services. The RIAA would have been a DEAD DUCK had they created all of these Windows services and blatantly abused their power to prohibit any Apple sales. And Apple did not want to use any DRM at all. They wanted to actually offer the product the public wanted to buy, MP3s. The RIAA didn't take the tiny Apple market seriously, and they desperately needed Apple on board, so they bent a little bit and allowed Apple slightly less oppressive terms than anyone else. So obviously iTunes was able to stomp the other services. It was less oppressive and less crippled. It's still a fraction of what it would be if they were actually selling MP3s.
Side note: While the RIAA is proudly proclaiming signifigant percentage drops year after year, independant labels are popping up left and right and they are seeing double and tripple digit percentage GROWTH.The RIAA's rufusal to sell anything other than DRM crippled crap is hugely fueling this indy growth. Indy labels and artists that can steal away RIAA marketshare by offering the product the customer wants, by offering non-crippled products, by offering MP3s for sale.
fairplay is actually fair
Not so long as there is any expectation of DRM enforcment against absolutely NON-INFRINGING use. Not so long as there is any expectation that innocent non-infringing people are felons for making or using Hymn. No, there is nothing "fair" about expecting fair use to be a felony. Fair use isn't simply some "reasonable" selection of uses, fair use is what the LAW says CANNOT be restricted by copyright.
making a tape copy of a CD was copyright infringment. And they were probably right, it was.
Baloney. Learn the law. Go read the Supreme Court cases on the subject. This post is long enough without attempting to teach the legalities of fair use.
complaints and props to apple.
Well, Apple is pretty much under the thumb of the RIAA. The DRM system wasn't Apple's doing. They fought not to have it at all. They didn't want any DRM and they STILL don't want any DRM.
Though it really would have been nice had Apple not caved on the issue. Had Apple said we want to sell MP3s, period. I'd have loved to see the RIAA hang on anti-trust conspiracy, for imposing a Windows only market, and for abusing their copyright monopoly to control formats.
-
Re:I'd BUY songs on iTunes if they were DRM free (Score:3, Insightful)
If you buy music from iTunes, none of your music is of archival quality. For that, you need to store your music as AIFF of FLAC files.
In an ideal world, where everyone has lots of bandwidth and storage, people would buy their music online in FLAC format, which they can do whatever they like with: burn to CD, convert to MP3 etc. Sadly, that's not the direction we're going in.
Re:"Sensible DRM" Sensible to Who? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your argument would almost even make sense if iPod only played music purchased through Apple's iTunes music store. But, the fact is, you can play whatever you want on the hardware (Sorry, Ogg has its place and purposes, but really isn't all that relevant for consumer music playback).
Apple doesn't own the music, they own the distribution chain. That's all. If you don't like Blockbuster, then you go down the street and buy movies from someone else. Likewise, if you don't like Apple, don't buy. Go buy the same content distributed through another source.
Apple doesn't guard any doors except to the end-to-end system which they created themselves. They keep no one from creating their own parallel system; Apple "owns" none of the music, nor controls the distribution of content in any other medium.
If you don't want to play the game, then don't. Go get yourself a copy of emule, start feeling 1337 and pat yourself on the back, man; you're sticking it to the man (Artist? What artist?).
Re:Why crack it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Artists and such could follow such an open-source model. The FSF might be against that, but I don't work for them, and I have no problem with that concept.
Also, artists could be paid based on number of downloads. If a million dollars are available, and my song is downloaded 999,999 times to your 1 time of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, I get the 999k and change, and you get a buck. It is possible to get pretty accurate statistics through random sampling, ask TV about Nielsen ratings. Networks can also be sampled more widely. Not perfect, but very close (and really, the imperfections would amount to no more then current clerical errors on cue sheets). As to where the money would come from, it would come from a "pool" from the flat rates paid, or under collective license model, under a tax on (media/bandwidth/CD burners/take your pick). That pool would be divided according to popularity (so no, your version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star does -not- weigh in equally with Nickelback's new single. Unless you get the same number of downloads.)
And of course, artists would still be able to perform live. There is certainly something about seeing Dave Matthews live that downloading a videotape of the performance doesn't even begin to capture, as is true of many other artists. Not everything can be digitized, but this model would be very fair to both producer and consumer for those things which can be.
And not everyone downloads this stuff. Some people prefer to go to Best Buy and purchase their shiny new CD/DVD/shrinkwrapped software package. Those people will not be going away anytime soon. But in the meantime, some of us don't. And every successful company in the world learns this-it's a cliche, but most cliches get that way because they're correct.
The customer is ALWAYS right.
When your customers say "We want this", you have several choices. You may find a way to deliver what they want, in the way they want it, at the price they want it, and make money. If you do this, your business will succeed. You may decide it's impossible, close up the shop, and go home to try something else. Or you may tell your customers that they're wrong, and try to push on them what they don't want rather than give them what they do. In that case, you should spend time researching bankruptcy lawyers, you'll need one pretty soon.
Currently, the "IP industries" are telling us-their customers-that not only are we wrong, we are thieves. I wonder, if I get into law school specializing in bankruptcy now, how soon I can graduate? There'll be a need pretty soon. Treating your customers like criminals is not, anywhere that I've seen, advised for someone who wants to run a successful business. And don't kid yourself that this is theft. This is an intangible. Theft is walking into the store and walking out with an item (a physical one) for which you did not pay. What's going on here is more akin to walking in and talking to the salescperson for a while, but not buying anything. You cost the company money, granted (they pay those salespeople, and they could've been selling to someone interested), but by the logic of the **AA's, that company should be able to sue you. For causing them-not real damages, but imaginary, potential damages.