joegratz.net

The hacker known as “DVD Jon”, famous for breaking the encryption found on DVDs, is at it again. He’s written a small utility that allows users to circumvent the encryption on files downloaded from the iTunes Music Store. When you play an encrypted file when Jon’s program is installed, a perfect, compressed copy of the file is saved to the desktop.

Of course, you could always get a fairly clean copy of any encrypted audio file simply by playing it while running a sound recording application like TotalRecorder in the background. That way, you end up with raw PCM data, like a WAV file; if you want it in its original compressed format, you have to re-compress it. Because the audio compression used by iTunes and other music download services is lossy, decompressing and recompressing the audio results in a loss of quality. Using Jon’s program, the file you end up with is identical to the original compressed encrypted file — but without the encryption.

Happily for Apple, it’s rather hard to get one’s hands on the code (which is available at http://www.nanocrew.net/software/QTFairUse.tar.gz); once one does, it’s rather hard to get it running properly. It requires installing a minimal GNU system on your Windows box and compiling the DLL yourself using gcc. (If that last sentence didn’t make sense to you, you won’t be able to use this.) And you still have to buy the tracks in the first place; this just means that once you do, the technology won’t keep you from making infringing uses of the files — say, by sharing them on a P2P network.

Because iTunes Music Store already allows users to burn CDs, transfer the files to iPods, and listen to songs on multiple computers, this particular crack doesn’t add anything other than the ability to send downloaded songs to friends.