RealNetworks Reverse-Engineers Apple's FairPlay DRM Scheme

DRM sucks anyways. It has so many flaws. Soon, Microsoft's DRM will blow up your hard disk when you install Longhorn, thanks to NGSCB

natwest: You are only partly right. The iPod WILL allow you to put any unprotected music in the formats you mentioned. HOWEVER, songs bought from RealNetwork's would need to be converted to an unprotected format (and also lower quality since it would need to be transcoded) to be stored on the iPod. While these tech articles may be partly misleadin, the fact of the matter is that Apple IS still locking other companies from using the iPod to store their own protected music files.

natwest: No, but the DMCA does prohibit you from circumventing protections on copyrighted materials. Real breaking Apple's DRM is the same thing as DeCSS breaking DVD encryption. Whether or not you agree with DMCA, Apple does have a case. Of course, it's possible Real did it just to provide a test case to try to get DMCA thrown out, but they have to be aware that they're opening themselves up for an inevitable lawsuit.

The article states "iPod customers have been forced to use Apple's online music store because the iPod supports only the company's Protected Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format." This is untrue.

The iPod supports MP3 (32 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible, AIFF, WAV and Apple Lossless audio formats in addition to AAC (with and without FairPlay DRM). I find it in poor taste that technolgy news writers (not just this one) mislead their readers with such mis-information.

Because of such reporting there are many people who believe that iTunes can only work with the iPod. iTunes can work with a wide array of portable digital audio players that support MP3s.

The limitations and lock-in have to do with FairPlay managed AAC files sold through the iTunes Music Store. There are ways around this however.

Of course you already knew all of this.

Real claims that they didn't reverse engineer FairPlay. That sounds logical to me. After all, FairPlay was reverse engineered already 6 months ago:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01/05/itunes_drm_cracked_wide_open/

Why waste time reverse engineering when you can just look at publicly available information?

http://developers.videolan.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/vlc/modules/demux/mp4/

PezHacker:
Was the DMCA amended recently to outlaw putting DRM on files? No. Perhaps your point was that Apple will launch a frivolous lawsuit?