FairPlay is turned about. "DVD" Jon Lech Johansen, of
DeCSS fame, has reverse engineered Apple's
FairPlay DRM technology, which has thus far prevented 3rd-party digital music players from playing music purchased from the iTunes Store. RealNetworks did
something similar in 2004, but Johansen is licensing it to whomever wants it.
posted by mkultra
on Oct 2, 2006 -
41 comments
It's the equivalent of "You can play the CD on three designated CD players that support the DRM. Like,
it will play ONLY on xyz brand cd player and only three of those that you pick. Yes, you have to stick to that brand of cd player (the iTunes player, the supported OS of iTunes, no unix support in sight) and too bad if you have a fourth one in the bedroom. It's not gonna play in your second car's player either. Nor in the kitchen. Nor on your neighbor's player. Nor can you trade it on the used market when you're tired of listening to it. "
"They finally found a way to sell you some wind. Even better, they will restrict the direction and force in wich the wind will blow, how often and where it will happen..."
As "DVD-Jon" Johansen goes to
retrial, a
backlash is rising in the media & community towards Apple's DRM (digital rights management), a week after this same kid created an open-source
program that lets users copy the songs that they bought onto other sources.
posted by omidius
on Dec 2, 2003 -
28 comments
Jon Johansen of DeCSS fame has made a program that
strips iTunes ACC files of DRM.
Here is what he has to say about it. Maybe I will give iTunes a try after all.
posted by epimorph
on Nov 26, 2003 -
16 comments
Who says DeCSS litigation is
dead? Norwegian court indicts the fellow who cracked DVD protection.
posted by donkeysuck
on Jan 11, 2002 -
2 comments
Watch where you link. The recent court findings in the DeCSS case apparently included the ruling that linking to a site containing illegal material -- even if it's just to report that fact to others -- is not protected as free speech (and possibly illegal).
[NYTimes link; login: metafi/metafi]
posted by mattpfeff
on Dec 14, 2001 -
7 comments
Court of Appeals upholds ban against DeCSS. More significant than the banning of DVD cracking is the edict directed towards 2600, which has been forbidden to post any links related to DeCSS. My concern with this decision is whether the current decision may be interpreted in a broader context, preventing others from linking to sites that aren't as sexy as Mom and Apple Pie to the powers that be. Maybe I'm overreacting. But could we see bloggers forced to remove certain links and led to the Tombs if they refuse? Discuss.
posted by ed
on Nov 28, 2001 -
15 comments
The math geeks have done it again. Yet another prime number which, when converted to binary, contains DeCSS: this one's an x86 Linux ELF executable. Only took a weekend of hacking to do, and it's only 752 bytes! You know what they say: when prime numbers are outlawed, only outlaws will have prime numbers.
posted by darukaru
on Sep 11, 2001 -
0 comments
What the hell is Martin Garbus up to? Oozing incredulity, a federal appeals court smacked down the injunction barring publication of "The Wind Done Gone", a parody of "Gone With The Wind" from the perspective of a slave, flatly describing the lower-court ban as "an unlawful prior restraint in violation of the First Amendment" -- pretty much what most right-thinking copyright thinkers have
asserted all along.
So since when is Martin Garbus, lead counsel selected by EFF to run the DeCSS case, a man who got started by defending Lenny Bruce, a lawyer Feed described as having "a long and unparalleled record as an advocate for first amendment rights", whose free speech bona fides include at one point hiding the Pentagon Papers in his apartment -- why is this man representing Margaret Mitchell's heirs on the definitively wrong side of an open-and-shut First Amendment case?
posted by bumppo
on May 25, 2001 -
16 comments
A modern Dr Bowdler... (yeah, I know it's Salon, but...) A video-rental store in Utah offers "cleaned up" versions of modern films. First thought: is it legal? Post-DeCSS, one would think not: after all, the MPAA has done its best to protect its right to control the manner of reproduction. But are the studios not jumping to litigate, because they're happier to alienate Linux users with DVD drives than the LDS contingent in UT?
posted by holgate
on Jan 11, 2001 -
31 comments
Is linking illegal? New York Times article about DeCSS linkage fiasco involving 2600. If linking is illegal, the Web is SOL. This is insane.
posted by elgoose
on Jun 16, 2000 -
7 comments
