QTFairUse6 Updated Hours After iTunes7 Release 292
Nrbelex writes "Mere hours after iTunes 7's release, QTFairUse6 has received an update which enables it to continue stripping iTunes songs of their 'FairPlay' DRM. Some features are experimental but at least it's proof that the concept still works."
Re:Apple - "whoops" (Score:5, Interesting)
Slightly off topic, but I wonder how you feel about downloding content that was on broadcast TV. Take the show "Lost" for example. Lets say you missed it when it was broadcast. Now, you could have recorded it for free and stripped out the commercials. But you didn't for whatever reason. You could wait a year for the DVD to come out, but you don't want to wait. You could pay some "legit" online service for the convenience of downloading, but why should pay for something that was broadcast for free just yesterday? Is there anything wrong with downloading it or getting it from a friend?
-matthew
Re:How much has changed? (Score:1, Interesting)
Besides, DRM was madated by the recording and TV/movie studios. Apple had a DRM-less iPod until their store went live.
Re:Why iTunes works (Score:5, Interesting)
I bet a sizable sum that most of them didn't even notice yet that it contains DRM. Simply because nobody bothered to try to copy it instead of simply clicking and paying the buck.
I can give anecdotal support to that (for whatever that's worth). Everyone in my work group uses iTunes to manage their music. Some of us use the iTunes store heavily, some of us only use it for free stuff. A couple weeks ago we decided to make a master playlist so all of our musical preferences could be equally represented in the shuffle. Some people were quite shocked and a little angry to find out that some of their favorite tracks could not be put in the mix. A couple people swore of iTunes forever. (Though I have real doubts that they'll stick to that.)
Re:Let the law suits begin (Score:4, Interesting)
When you play the law game, the argument of the form "Look, there's a definition of X in the dictionary, under which X didn't happen. Therefore, I didn't do X. Ha-ha! Got you!" works about as well as I've made it sound.
Oh yeah, as if lawyers never exploit technicalities. The technicality here, of course, is that you are gaining access to the copyrighted work with permission of the copyright owner and through the approved method. It's being decoded into memory in the correct and legal means, and you then have a legally decoded copy in memory. The user is then copying that copy in accordance with fair use. There's no circumvention of the controlled access to the work, because it's an issue of what the user who has controlled access does with that access.
I'm not saying it's an iron-clad argument or anything, but it certainly could be argued on very technical grounds, and that's a large part of what lawyers do-- argue about the wording and meaning of laws in a very technical way. The point is, the transformation from a protected copy to an unprotected copy is done explicitly how the copyright holder has given permission for it to be done. Every time you play a song in iTunes, the program is making an unprotected copy in memory, and this program is simply a means to KEEP that copy.