iTunes DRM reportedly cracked wide open for GNU/Linux

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2004 15:14:59 -0800 (PST)
From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall <jhall () sims berkeley edu>
Reply-To: joehall () pobox com
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>, Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
Subject: iTunes DRM cracked wide open for GNU/Linux...

On the heals of winning his trial and preliminarily cracking the
iTunes format, Don Jon has just integrated the stripping of iTunes DRM
into the VideoLan project... this allows one to play Apple AAC-DRM'd
songs on multiple workstations or any mobile player (part of the
problem is that Apple only supports its format on the iPod... which we
all know has other vendor lock-in problems (ahem... the battery,
lack of support in iTunes for other jukeboxes, etc.)). -Joe

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34712.html

iTunes DRM cracked wide open for GNU/Linux. Seriously.
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco

Exclusive Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen, who broke the DVD
encryption scheme, has opened iTunes locked music a tad further, by
allowing people to play songs they've purchased on iTunes Music Store
on their GNU/Linux computers.

"We're about to find out what Apple really thinks about Fair Use,"
Johansen told The Register via email.

Johansen cracked iTunes DRM scheme in November by releasing code for a
small Windows program that dumps the stream to disk in raw AAC format.
This raw format required some trivial additions to convert it to an
MP4 file that could be played on any capable computer.

But in the best Apple ease-of-use tradition, Johansen has now made
this completely seamless, integrating it with the VideoLAN streaming
free software project.

[...]

While Apple's iTunes Music Store is restricted to Windows and Apple
computers, and Apple only supports its own iPod player as a playback
device, VideoLAN is GPL software that runs on a wide variety of
computers including Linux, the BSDs, Solaris and even QNX. Although
users are at present permitted to burn a CD with music they've
purchased, only three Apple or Windows computers are "authorized" at
any time. These terms may be tightened at any time, Johansen himself
noted recently.

[...]

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Joseph Lorenzo Hall                    http://pobox.com/~joehall/
Graduate Student             blog: http://pobox.com/~joehall/nqb/
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