REVENGE Posted October 26, 2006 Share Posted October 26, 2006 We ran across this story last week, but after giving it some thought, decided that we wanted to hear the community response to this news. 22 year old Jon Lech Johansen, the crazy hacker who ripped DVD encryption technology wide open at the age of 15 has now decided to declare war on Apple's iTunes FairPlay DRM technology. Specifically, he and his company DoubleTwist have developed programs to bypass FairPlay and allow encrypted music purchased from non-iTunes music stores to be played on the iPod. As early as 2004, Johansen had been working hard earlier at creating various "cracks" in the FairPlay DRM wall. Back in January of 04, he had successfully reverse engineered the technology and supplied the code used to develope the playfair utility. Later on, he released his own FairPlay removal utility called DeCRMS. An additional creation called FairKeys allowed DeCRMS to automatically retrieve keys from Apple's servers to use for decryption. Now, his new FairPlay "enabling-patch" is based on adding code that emulates FairPlay encryption to non-encrypted songs, fooling the iPod to play the music. In fact, he claims that this technology is 100% legal as it doesn't involve breaking the encryption. If this fact holds, Johansen has stated his intent to license this technology to digital music stores, allowing everyone to sell music to iPod users. If he succeeds, Johansen could possibly sidestep any of Apple's own future plans to license FairPlay DRM technology to music stores. It seems that Apple's DRM fishtank has sprung leaks...both ways. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Swad Posted October 30, 2006 Share Posted October 30, 2006 Hmm... tough call. I don't think he should get money for licensing it, but I also think Apple is too restrictive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bofors Posted October 30, 2006 Share Posted October 30, 2006 Legally, DVD-Jon may be in the clear. The Lexmark DMCA precedent would seem to apply here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050221-4636.html] ... to liscense ... to lisence You know that OS X has built-in spelling right? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A Nonny Moose Posted October 30, 2006 Share Posted October 30, 2006 Hmm... tough call. I don't think he should get money for licensing it, but I also think Apple is too restrictive. He shouldn't get money for doing something ILLEGAL (and let's face the law here, it's illegal). As to Apple being too restrictive, I don't think it is at all. If you have such a major problem with it, burn your music to a CD (thus removing all DRM) and then re-rip it and put it on as many systems as you like. It's not like Apple made a back door to this issue already. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bofors Posted October 30, 2006 Share Posted October 30, 2006 ... (and let's face the law here, it's illegal). Really? Perhaps you would be kind to enough educated us layman on the finer points of reverse engineering law? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A Nonny Moose Posted November 3, 2006 Share Posted November 3, 2006 You are violating the licensing agreement (a legally binding contract) when you reverse engineer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fireshark Posted November 3, 2006 Share Posted November 3, 2006 And the legal definition of reverse engineering is? For example the developers of ReactOS are clean room reverse engineering Windows, have they got sued by Microsoft? No. Does MS EULA allow reverse engineering? Noo.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Urbz Posted November 4, 2006 Share Posted November 4, 2006 Yes but ReactOS is free...this won't be. I encourage you all to download the Mac Onserver's Weekly Roundup podcast dated 2006-10-28 (currently most recent). Although this may be lagal, I'm not sure it'll be feasible unless, as they mention in the podcast, this has been done perfectly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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