FairUse4WM Breaks Windows DRM 617
An anonymous reader writes "FairUse4WM, according to engadget, "can be used to strip Windows Media DRM 10 and 11". What does the slashdot community think of this development in the ongoing cat-and-mouse game going on between big media and what is available online?"
Follow-up; Cory Doctorow on DRM at MSFT (Score:5, Informative)
This whole thing reminds me of Cory Doctorow's DRM and MSFT: A Product No Customer Wants [boingboing.net].
Also of interest: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Headline incorrect. (Score:2, Informative)
Some of us don't have this fixation on the thought that software and music should be free. Regardless of what you think, its currently not, right or wrong. Piracy of software and music is still piracy and still illegal.
What does DRM have to do with Piracy?
Re:Actually hope they fix this (Score:4, Informative)
Or maybe you knew this and were trolling all along.
If only it were so easy... (Score:3, Informative)
As zoning laws apply to your property by precdent, licensing applies to the ones and zeros on your HD by precedent.
Silly nation of laws.
Bad News (Score:4, Informative)
So you're still stuck.
Not sure whether the DRM schemes are related at any fundamental level, though; perhaps a break in one of them could lead to a break in the other sometime soon? It's really surprised me that they haven't been circumvented earlier.
Re:Bad News (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Headline incorrect. (Score:5, Informative)
Well good for you, but please don't generalize your own situation to the rest of the world. I happen to have a Linux machine, and as such I can not (legally) do whatever I want to do with music I've purchased from iTunes.
Re:What I wonder is... (Score:3, Informative)
No. And it's unlikely that it ever will. Reasons why below.
WMDRM stores encryption keys on the system that purchased the media originally, and then uses those keys to decrypt the content when you want to listen to it (and stores / encrypts them in a way that is pretty obfuscated). What the creators of this program have done is find a way to duplicate that process, but then just dump the decrypted content back out to an unencrypted .wma file that will play anywhere.
So to answer (1) more fully, to work on Linux this thing would have to access the keys from the Windows install that originally purchased the content, AND it would have to fully re-implement the decryption process (unlike the way I believe the current version works, which is by figuring out how to call the decryption functions in the MS DLLs correctly).
Re:Headline incorrect. (Score:5, Informative)
But that teacher isn't. Educational use is enshrined in the Copyright law as an allowable use. DRM that refuses to allow this is illegal, as it infringes on a legal right.
Similarly, commentary, parody, and many other "Fair Use" exceptions exist, none of which the current DRM regime respects.
Re:Actually hope they fix this (Score:4, Informative)
Um, no they don't. I know because I tried yesterday (new HD, so reinstall and rerip of CDs). I ended up having to use EphPod to recover the M4P files from my iPod.
Re:Actually hope they fix this (Score:5, Informative)
Plus, once you've gone past five times that Apple's decided your computer is different, you also lose all your music. Gone. Locked out.
Apple is just as evil as the rest of them. At least the "rent music" places are telling you up front that you're just renting and that you can lose the ability to play your downloads at the drop of a hat.
Re:Headline incorrect. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Actually hope they fix this (Score:2, Informative)
Wrong. You can deauthorize all computers at once easily through iTunes. You'll need to reauthorize on any existing machines that you still actually use after doing this, and you can only do it once a year. So I'll give you "locked out" (if you somehow get yourself into this spot twice in 12 months), but "gone" is just false. The files are still in your library, and hopefully wherever you backed them up. You do back them up, don't you?
Bout Time (Score:2, Informative)
Alternative: use stream capture software (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Actually hope they fix this (Score:3, Informative)
Download sites (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Headline incorrect. (Score:5, Informative)
I subscribed to Yahoo! Music Unlimited, upgraded my Windows Media Player, installed all of the patches and purchased a brand spanking new Creative Zen Vision last year.
The whole setup process was about two hours after the litany of patches and firmware upgrades, but it worked...actually very well...
Then one day, about 7 months later, it failed.
For no explainable reason other than "DRM is garbage", my player decided to play only the first song downloaded, and then claim that every other song was unlicensed thereafter. It didn't matter which track, the minute it skipped to the next one, everything was unplayable that was DRM'd.
You can imagine how abundantly helpful Yahoo!'s tech support was (not at all). So I cancelled my subscription.
Lets add up my total costs:
1-year Subscription (at the time $4.99/month, now $9.99): $59.88
New media player for subscription content: $399.99 (somewhere in that range)
Number of tracks effectively "rented" for seven months: ~150
Total Cost "the day the music died": $459.87 or >$3.00/tracks I didn't get to keep.
Sure, I factored the player into the cost and maybe that's not fair since I still use it for videos and music (and I would buy it again, today, if given a choice), but the fact remains that I had to buy a new player because only a select few are subscription compatible.
I won't resubscribe now that this tool is available because my guess is that Microsoft will have this hole patched before the week is out (Here's betting they don't wait until "Patch Tuesday" for this update, we all know where their priorities are).
So I have access to less music (legally) "at my finger-tips", but at least I get to enjoy the music on all of my PCs, my stereo, my two players, and wherever the heck else I can adapt the unencumbered tracks to.
It's amazing to me that something that was "standard" 100 years ago (unencrypted/encumbered music) is now the first feature I look for in music I buy.
Re:Headline incorrect. (Score:3, Informative)
"Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not infringements of copyright:
(1) performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction, unless, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, the performance, or the display of individual images, is given by means of a copy that was not lawfully made under this title, and that the person responsible for the performance knew or had reason to believe was not lawfully made; "
and continues in much the same vein for a while. Note that interpreting this verbiage so that you know your rights exactly would require access to case law and a legal professional...
Re:Headline incorrect. (Score:3, Informative)
It doesn't.
Sounds like someone needs to read section 107 of US copyright law, which is titled "Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use" and states:
Yes, US copyright law specifically grants fair use rights.
It does bring up two things that really are myths, though:
#1. That the examples cited above are the *only* applications of fair use. Note that the law itself uses the words "including" and "such as" - the courts are free to interpret other examples of fair use, and indeed have. The criteria for determining what is and isn't fair use are what matters, not the examples.
#2. That the DMCA restricts and contradicts the fair use law. It doesn't. In fact, under the section 1201, entitled "Circumvention of copyright protection systems", you will find this nugget:
In other words, it is only illegal to circumvent DRM if you are doing so to infringe copyright. It is not illegal to circumvent DRM for purposes that would otherwise fall under fair use.
This is all part of copyright law. Fair use is not some idea that the EFF invented because they want to have free music. This is part of the contract that copyright holders have with the government; it is written into law and has been tested repeatedly in court.
ugh (Score:3, Informative)
My biggest fan writes:
Ripping with iTunes does not add DRM to your music. Ripping with Windows Media Player can add DRM to your music, but it's a choice you are given very clearly when you first rip a CD with it.
As if anyone can rip their CDs and transfer the results any number of times to any device on either system. If that were true, the world would be a better place because DRM would not be DRM.
Not having either iTunes or WMP, I have to defer to what others report. For WMP and iTunes, I trust Cory Doctorow of the EFF [craphound.com] and my own friends. For an updated look at where WMP has gone, I'll refer you to previous posts quoting the Washington Post review of ViiV and WMP, which show things have gotten worse instead of better in the last two years. Yes, my biggest fan is sure to know where that is, so I don't even have to look for it.
Doctrow has this to say:
I hit Apple's three-iTunes-authorized-computers limit pretty early on and found myself unable to play the hundreds of dollars' worth of iTunes songs I'd bought ... If I hadn't bought so much iTunes music that burning it to CD and re-ripping it and re-keying all my metadata was too daunting a task to consider, I would have been fine. As it was Apple rewarded my trust, evangelism and out-of-control spending by treating me like a crook and locking me out of my own music ...
...
I know who used to rip their CDs to WMA. You guys sold them software that produced smaller, better-sounding rips than the MP3 rippers, but you also fixed it so that the songs you ripped were device-locked to their PCs. What that meant is that when they backed up their music to another hard-drive and reinstalled their OS (something that the spyware and malware wars has made more common than ever), they discovered that after they restored their music that they could no longer play it. The player saw the new OS as a different machine, and locked them out of their own music.
He's being too nice to Apple about the rekeying and M$ about WMA formats. Friends have told me that Apple's restore is a royal pain that loses the metadata. If you've lost the metadata, you might as well re rip all of your CDs again. I know I don't want to go through that every three computers. The EULA is unilaterally changeable, so once they have you they can impose whatever they want. In the end they are going to impose what the RIAA wants, which is what M$ delivers today. Oh yeah, if the "choice" about adding DRM to your ripped CDs was so clear, how come so many people have gotten burnt that Doctrow can walk onto M$'s campus and wag his finger at them?
I'm going to skip the whole mess. WMA is not really better than MP3 and both loose out to ogg. Free software does everthing I want it to do with my music and comes without restrictions of anykind.
Looks like it uses a similar method to unDRM tivo (Score:3, Informative)
This program seems to do a similar thing with the WMA files, it doesn't recode, it just filters the file through windows media player libraries and copies out the decrypted streams.
I like it.
Now, if there were only an online music service that had better quality files then Napster... and didn't charge per-song.
New slashdot filter idea (Score:1, Informative)
b3po@freed:~$ dict piracy
3 definitions found
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Piracy \Pi"ra*cy\, n.; pl. {Piracies}. [Cf. LL. piratia, Gr. ?.
See {Pirate}.]
1. The act or crime of a pirate.
[1913 Webster]
2. (Common Law) Robbery on the high seas; the taking of
property from others on the open sea by open violence;
without lawful authority, and with intent to steal; -- a
crime answering to robbery on land.
[1913 Webster]
[1913 Webster]
Note: By statute law several other offenses committed on the
seas (as trading with known pirates, or engaging in the
slave trade) have been made piracy.
[1913 Webster]
3. "Sometimes used, in a quasi-figurative sense, of violation
of copyright; but for this, infringement is the correct
and preferable term." --Abbott.
[1913 Webster]
So those comments above really meant the word "infringers". If anyone still thinks copyright infringement involves the high seas or open violence, then they deserve their BSA, MPAA, and RIAA overlords.
A good filter could counteract politically-correct speak such as "piracy", and if slashdot does not do it, it would be a public service for a perl coder to whip up a filter to help rescue English from the juggernauts.