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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Thursday, November 27, 2003
17:24 - If someone was gonna do it, I'm glad it was him
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/11/27/itunes.code.ap/index.html

(top) link
This was only a matter of time:

Jon Lech Johansen, 19, faces a new trial that starts Tuesday after prosecutors appealed his January acquittal on charges that he violated Norway's data break-in laws with his DeCSS program for DVDs.

Last Friday, a new security-cracking program called QTFairUse was posted -- along with the message "So sue me" -- on a Web site for which Johansen is listed as the registrant, or owner.

The new program circumvents iTunes' anti-copying program, MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding, by legally opening and playing a protected music file in QuickTime, but then, essentially, draining the unprotected music data into a new and parallel file.

Of course, this sucks. But I don't think it means the end of the iTMS or anything.

Because, after all, the whole concept of online music buying is not founded on the idea that the DRM encryption would never be cracked. In fact, if such schemes were developed by anybody with any brains at all, they would have counted on it being cracked, sooner or later. But the whole idea behind the DRM in AAC is to make people want to buy music rather than to steal it. It's about making the music-buying process, the guarantee of quality, selection, organization, and service support, so easy and hassle-free and legitimate on your conscience that it's worth $1 per song to the buyer to have those things. If the buyer doesn't think those things are worth the price, after all, he can always get the same songs off KaZaA. Best of luck.

Even with 100% uncrackable DRM, the P2P services haven't gone away, and are always a form of competition for the online stores. But the wild success that the iTMS has had in its few months of life is an indication that a great many people would rather pay a dollar per song for peace of mind and guaranteed quality, than to brave the P2P networks and their numerous pitfalls-- badly organized files, badly recorded songs, rebuke-spam files from Madonna et al, and all the rest of it.

If the iTMS has performed this well against that kind of competition, then it doesn't have much to worry about from people using QTFairUse on their purchased songs and putting them on P2P networks. It wouldn't add any bulk to the illegitimate file-sharing content that isn't already present from people ripping CDs into MP3s. And Apple can probably fear about as much damage to its business as the DVD industry has suffered due to DeCSS.

Apple must have expected this to happen one fine day. But if their business plan was founded on AAC's DRM being sold to the labels as "uncrackable", then the whole concept of online music sales is doomed. But I don't think it is, because the business is designed on a much different claim: not that hackers would never break the seals, but that most buyers wouldn't want to.

In any case, if I'm reading the details of this story correctly, there isn't even anything particularly special about this crack-- it doesn't break the encryption, it simply opens the file legally-- meaning it has to be run by the legitimate buyer of the music-- and saves out an MP3. That kind of thing is fairly trivial to do, and always has been. But Apple hasn't been afraid of people with analog line-in cables, and likewise there's no reason for them to be afraid of a program that does the same thing.



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