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?"
ones and zeros (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually hope they fix this (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, information wants to be free and all that. But this service rocks. I haven't bought a CD since (probably not what they want to hear!) And it works fine with portable music players. You just have to plug it in every few weeks-which you can do to get more music anyway. Yeah, a bit annoying, but come singularity we won't have any limitations.
Bittorrent breaks Windows DRM (Score:3, Interesting)
The only thing I could see this being helpful for are cases where the media is unpopular and there's a fair use need to circumvent the DRM.
DMCA arrest (Score:3, Interesting)
I doubt Microsoft will let this slide.
Re:Actually hope they fix this (Score:2, Interesting)
Or then we'll see things really get clamped down with the 64-bit version of Vista. Ugh.
Re:Cat and Mouse? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bittorrent breaks Windows DRM (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd love to see a law that would make the acquisition of digital variants of legally owned materials legal.
That is to say, if I own a book and lose my eyesight, I should be able to download a digital version of the book for use with a screen reader without having to repurchase my entire library.
The same should go for downloading *exact* copies of music I already own; my CD gets wrecked in the sun so I keep it in the jewel case for proof and download a new copy off P2P services. Should this be legal?
Many of us live in democracies -- by the people, for the people, right? Go lobby your local representatives for the rights you believe you should have.
Re:Headline incorrect. (Score:2, Interesting)
lame examples. with Apple's DRM (the only one I'm familiar with) both of these examples are trivial (in fact Apple encourgaes you to make backups when you buy from them).
on the other hand, if I wanted to start lending my "backups" to other people (or at least more than 4 other people), or if I wanted to email these "educational" clips to everyone in my class then I'd have some trouble. but should I really be able to do those things anyway?
basically with Apple DRM *I* can do whatever *I* want to do, I just can't give the same right to other people. and isn't that what copyright is all about anyway? it has never been legal for me to transfer rights to other people's work and that's all that (Apple's) DRM stops me from doing.
What is the future of rental? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hilarious (Score:1, Interesting)
Particularly since this seems to be far less legitimate than Hymn and the like, in that it actually does let you have access to songs you have no legal access to - songs purchased on the subscription model where you've stopped paying the subscription.
Microsoft ploy? (Score:2, Interesting)
1. This causes a huge swell in memberships to the WMA services (Napster, Yahoo! and URGE) before their launch of Zune. Looks good on paper and looks good for Wall Street. Not to mention they patch the hole shortly thereafter...
2. They significantly disrupt the other WMA services (since they won't be needed anymore after Zune product launch?).
3. They get a ton of people to adopt WMA, fix the hole, and then hope people say "this ain't so bad, I might just pay for the service and/or a player to avoid the inconvenience of converting/rebuilding my collection on the iPod platform".
4. Build a "blacklist" of IPs/computers prone to piracy.
5. Build a marketing list of people who likely object to FairPlay.
6. Great publicity stunt for WMA, it's services and devices (bad press is better than no press?).
7. Excellent way to grab marketshare from iTMS and not at their own expense (unless the RIAA tries to recoup it's losses from MSFT).
Any other suggestions?
Re:Bittorrent breaks Windows DRM (Score:2, Interesting)
other uses to DRM (Score:2, Interesting)
I think too many focus on the negative aspects of DRM associated with media files to remember that it has some very useful qualities.
Re:Headline incorrect. (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe your school doesn't use computers, or doesn't use them effectivly, but they aren't "just" for word processing and "myspace". It's important to think about innovative current or future uses instead of dwelling on ancient historical uses of computers in education.
DRM really hampers the flow of information in education. Since DRM is still fairly new, the impact has yet to be felt in any major way.
(BTW, let's be grownups and stop with the personal attacks, M-Kay?)
FairUse4WM is not a baddie (Score:4, Interesting)
But they didnt.
What is the big deal??? (Score:3, Interesting)
And before everyone says, "Well you shouldn't have to burn and rerip", I do agree, but I would be burning for a backup copy anyway, not to mention to listen in the car that doesn't have the iPod adapter.
So can someone please tell me why breaking DRM is news, my CD burner and I have been doing it for years.
Re:Headline incorrect. (Score:5, Interesting)
I own some Apple DRM'd music, and I want to play it on my mobile 'phone, which supports AAC. I want to play it on my spare machine that runs FreeBSD. I can do both of these with AACs I've ripped from CD, but not with iTMS DRM'd music.
it has never been legal for me to transfer rights to other people's work and that's all that (Apple's) DRM stops me from doing.
If my musical tastes change, I can sell music I own on CD. I can't resell iTMS music. Transferring rights is find from a copyright perspective under the doctrine of first sale. If I buy a CD, I can sell it on. I have to delete all of my backups, but I don't violate copyright law by selling it.
Copyright should be about the right to make and distribute copies. If I create something copyrightable (and I'm a writer, so this is not just a gedanken experiment), I have the right to restrict who distributes copies of it. That is the only right I have under copyright law. I don't have the right to say 'blind people are not allowed to feed it through a screen reader.' I don't have the right to say 'you may not read this from a mobile device.' I don't even have the right to say 'you may not photocopy a few pages of this book to read on the train when you don't want to lug the entire book with you.' If you want to tear pages out of a book I've written, or change the font of something I've written for online distribution, then that is entirely up to you; I don't have the legal (or moral) right to tell you not to.
Copyright is a limited monopoly on distribution granted to encourage the production of content. It is not a right, and it is not a privilege; it is a trade. The state awards me limited rights in exchange for my relinquishing others (which I could retain by simply not publishing). We both win; I gain a method of producing income, while others gain access to the material I produce. By exercising copyright, I am agreeing to this; I am saying 'I wish to retain exclusive distribution rights, in exchange for publishing this work and permitting others to purchase it.' DRM alters this balance. If I publish a DRM'd version of something, then I am attempting to retain more control than copyright grants me. This is nothing more and nothing less than vigilanteism.
Re:Actually hope they fix this (Score:4, Interesting)
What about 10/20 years from now?
Have you ever picked up a tape/record/old cd that you used to listen to and pop it in? It's a great experience to be "teleported" back to Junior High or whenever...
When I buy music, I buy it forever (forever being a really long time of course). Yeah, it's cool to have a music service that you can download shitloads of music from _for now_ but 10 years from now you might look around and wish you had spent that monthly fee on physical cd's instead of renting ones and zeros.
Like I said... this is just my personal opinion... but it's personally the thing that keeps me from buying DRM'd stuff. I want to "own" what I pay for as much as possible... so I can do what I like with it and keep it and use it as long as I like. But maybe I'm in the minority.
Friedmud
Is there a mac or linux version of this (Score:3, Interesting)
Barring that is there any way to play WMA with the DRM 7.0 on liinux or macs?
And what will the french say? After all AAC/itunes drm, will play on windows machines. And apple even provides cracking tools for it's own DRM ( imovie tranlates it to AIFF that is DRM free). So the itunes DRM is more of a honesty reinforcement protocol than a fairuse prohibition. If the French did not like AAC/drm why are they not making a perfumed hairy armpit stink over WMA?
DRM? (Score:2, Interesting)
What about Janus-DRM files? (Score:5, Interesting)
A little backdrop for context -
Like a lot of people, I travel a lot (commute to work, business trips, family, etc...). I have a Creative Zen Touch 40GB w/PlayForSure update that I've been pretty pleased with for the past year. However, last April I was doing my semi-annual reinstall of Windows on my Tablet PC. Being quite naive, I just assumed backing up My Music would be sufficient for license back-up -- after all, it contains the "My License Backup" folder. So you know, just going with that. Noooo sirreee, Rhapsody will have none of that. It informed me that each DRM'd file I had used with RhapsodyToGo didn't have a valid license or was corrupt. The only way I could get the files to update their licenses was to queue the files needing a license update for download, pause the download, then cancel the download. This worked great for files on my computer, but the licenses wouldn't transfer to my MP3 player. Additionally, my playlists were broken because of this mess. These inconveniences, coupled with the fact that I don't feel like browsing through Rhapsody's unresponsive IE-control and manually selecting the gigabytes of locked-up and unplayable files on my tablet and MP3 player forced me back to BitTorrent.
Words cannot capture how fucking frustrating it is to have a 5 hour drive ahead of you and be presented with a "No License To Play File" message when you try to play half the files on your MP3 player. No warning, no hint, not even a goddamn "License will expire in x days" message when I downloaded the file originally. Which brings me to another point -- I pay my RhapsodyToGo subscription quarterly, why the fuck should I have to update once a month? . Or put more accurately -- GUESS when I should have to update during the month, because that's part of the fun - YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT DAY THE FILES EXPIRE.
Anyways, I got kinda off track there. I simply downloaded MP3s and FLACs of the music I wanted and replaced most of the DRM'd horseshit, but certain artists (e.g., Robert Johnson, Blind Willie Johnson, Muddy Waters, hell even mainstream artists like Jeff Beck) are harder to find on P2P networks and BitTorrent trackers. So a tool which could unlock the files I've legitmately acquired would be really great.
If anyone from Microsoft or RealNetworks is reading this -- I'm trying to do the right thing, but you're making it so fucking difficult. It's almost as if you want me to pirate the music.
Re:Headline incorrect. (Score:5, Interesting)
Helpful, yes... required, no. US citizens have a right to bear arms for a purpose of protection from the government, however it is illegal to use those arms against the government.
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
Umm... No. People that Pirate don't give a fuck about DRM because they are already circumventing it and hence do not complain. These people are either using audio video hijack programs and analog loop holes and don't really care about quality as long as its free.
The people that are complaining about DRM are those who are getting fucked by it or can't buy online media because they don't want to have to be tied in to that companies DRM and loose all their music when the company goes bankrupt or a software glitch hoses their authorization key.
Its why I won't buy iTunes music... I really don't like the idea of a hard drive crash killing my music and I have to pay for it all over again because I had to jumps through hoops of fire to back that data up (yeah I could burn it to audio cd and then back again but each time you burn from lossey and re-encode to lossey formats from that cd you loose quality big time. Not to mention you will have to manually type in the CD track names over again).
Until I get unecumbered MP3 downloads, I won't pay for it online. I'll stick to going to the local indie store and buying it there and then ripping it.
On the same note, I won't pirate a song either because the music I like is hard to find and online music sounds like crap or cuts out at the end. I'm willing ot spend that extra money for the quality but at the same time I don't want to pay for it twice if something goes wrong on the technical side of DRM.
Curious. (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't know what the big labels have in their contracts, but if they haven't been given a proxy to the copyrights, I don't see how they can provide/sell that music under any kind of DRM. The labels will own the software that provides the DRM, and that software they can do as they please, but if they don't have a proxy or own the copyrights to the music, then putting that music behind any kind of DRM would be illegal.
I also think the labels would have a better chance of owning or having a proxy on the music than Apple does. So if Apple doesn't have a proxy contract with the copyright owner of any music they sell, they shouldn't be able to have that music DRMed.
Re:Actually hope they fix this (Score:3, Interesting)
I have Rhapsody and Yahoo Music subscriptions. I use then on occasion but my kids use those and the my Sirius radio all day, every day. Both of these services combined are cheaper then buying a single CD a month. One of my kids listens to the popular song of the week and/or month and has absolutely no interest in maintaining long term ownership of those songs (and I don't blame her) because in two months, she will be on to something else. $5 or $10 is worth the cost of these services.
I will always have "my" copy of my classics and I will always want it that way and only in a source format that is not compressed.
Think of it this way, like a FIFO storage device with different capacities.
My personal buffer for music has a much larger and discriminating FIFO scheme then my kids do. They hold about 40 songs and always add new ones. I have about 20 times the capacity but rarely add new ones.
For some people, subscription is good, for others it is not.
What's the ROI? (Score:1, Interesting)
After the millions have been invested in DRM development, was it worth it to protect the investment for the few years?
Are people inherently immoral? (Score:5, Interesting)
I understand that, given the chance, most consumers will steal media without a second thought.
I think this is true, although perhaps a bit too strong. What's interesting to me is *why* it's true, because I've found that most people are quite honest. They wouldn't dream of stealing a CD from a store, so why would they create an infringing copy of the same content?
I think the answer is: Because the media industry has screwed itself.
I think the reason people don't see infringement as immoral is because they don't understand the social contract that underlies copyright law. And that's because the social contract has been trashed so thoroughly by the media industry that it's effectively invisible. Joe Average isn't stupid, but he's not an IP lawyer and given that he has never seen any copyrights expire during his lifetime, and may never see it, the notion that copyright is a tradeoff of short-term disadvantage for long-term advantage never occurs to him, because as far as he knows it's just a permanent restriction. Ask Joe who owns the copyright to Shakespeare's works and he's likely to think it's a reasonable question.
Since Joe doesn't see that tradeoff, he evaluates infringement in its most direct, immediate terms: Who does it hurt, who does it help, and how do those balance? Who does it hurt? Well, no one, really. Perhaps Joe might have paid for it if he couldn't copy it, but maybe not, and besides those musicians are already millionaires, so it's not like anyone is going to go hungry. The pain inflicted by the loss of a single sale on someone who lives in a mansion and drives a Ferrarri is negligible. Who does it help? Why, Joe. Not in any huge way, but it gives him some music to listen to that he might not have otherwise been able to afford.
Ignoring the issue of what copyright is supposed to do, Joe's moral calculus is compelling. Weighing a clear good against a questionable and negligibly-small bad, the result is a no-brainer. If you throw in arguments about what would happen if everyone copied instead of buying, the waters are muddied a bit, but since that's not in imminent danger of occurring, it's a red herring.
If the media industry wants Joe to feel some moral obligation to honor copyright, they should push to go back to reasonable copyright terms, so that Joe can see the value of the copyright system as evidenced by the flow of materials into the public domain. When there's lots of stuff that he can copy, legally and without qualm, he'll be more concerned about the propriety of making infringing copies.
Personally, I saw that evolution in myself with respect to software. Before I switched over to using primarily Free software, I had no qualms about copying software that I knew I wasn't going to purchase -- and that even though I was a software developer making my living from copyrighted software. When I found that I could do most of what I needed to without infringing, though, I began to be offended by the idea of casual infringement. After a few years of Free software usage, I actually get angry at people who illegally copy software, and I don't use any commercial software without paying for it. I also don't copy music or movies illegally. I do download TV shows, but only because I can justify that I could have sucked them off the cable, albeit less conveniently.
What an ordeal! (Score:3, Interesting)
When they work perfectly, DRM schemes prevent you from doing many things with your media. When they don't work perfectly, they are infinitely more likely to erroneously prevent access than to erroneously grant it. The crime of it all is that purveyors of crippled content take advantage of gullible consumers by creating an illusion of simplicity, ease and permanence. Only when they try to use the content as they normally would do these folks find out that what they actually got was an ultra-complicated rental process that takes their content with it when they cancel.
Re:Headline incorrect. (Score:3, Interesting)
You aren't interpreting that quote correctly: the works must be science or useful art. The "promote" part is there to explain why congress is allowed to pass intellectual property laws, and does not impose any criteria on the nature of the works themselves.
Re:Headline incorrect. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Headline incorrect. (Score:3, Interesting)
I signed nothing, nor would I ever sign such limitations. Copyright gives me statutory rights, and those are what define the transaction. This is true irrespective of what DRM they attempt to install on disks I purchase.
I also see that you still have given no reference at all to whatever moral authority gives an author total control over something after he sold it to me; most likely because you realize that there is no such theory.
It matches these fanciful moral principals that you're inventing out of thin air.
Excersise of fair use rights is NOT disrespecting property. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright. The physical item is my property. The only kind of "property" the author retains is a limited lien over my ability to produce further copies of the information on my disk. The author does not retain any other rights over my disk, including rights over how I play it, what I play it in, or what copies I make under the exceptions to the lien that the author holds. (This is true even under the DMCA, which doesn't prevent me from hacking the DRM as long as I don't share knowledge of how I did it.) If anything, DRM schemes are a lame attempt to interfere with my rights over the property I own. Why don't you consider that to be immoral?
Re:Headline incorrect. (Score:3, Interesting)
These two things are not the same.
Asstard.
Re:I want to listen to music, is that so wrong? (Score:2, Interesting)
My girlfriend was listening to one of her brand new DRM'ed tracks and said "I like this one, but I miss a bass-line. It could go something like..." and then she started humming. And I though it would sound great, so I opened a tracker to create the bassline. First step however was to import the track without the bassline. I spend hours trying to do that, but the DRM stopped the project. I gave up.
We paid for the stupid track, we have a right to play around with it. It would have been fun and creative. It was fun back when we bought our music on CD, but today that is expensive and inconvenient.