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Despite the froth and fury being generated in the press about the breaching of iTunes’ song locks by the infamous hacker DVD Jon, the “accomplishment” really is nothing new.
The knowledge of how to strip off the digital rights management (DRM) information attached to downloaded music has been around for about two years now, Yankee Group’s Nitin Gupta told NewsFactor.
“The thing to understand about digital rights management,” he said, “is that there is no foolproof system. The approach should be to create a system in which the legal channels are more convenient than the illegal ones.”
Old Code, New Wrapper
What the DVD Jon did, Gupta explained, was to automate functionality already available to strip off songs’ DRM protection. Songs protected by the FairPlay DRM system developed by Apple have been available on peer-to-peer (P2P) music trading networks for some time.
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In fact, the DRM system developed by Microsoft and used by many other services — including
Napster
— also has been hacked, Gupta pointed out. When Apple head Steve Jobs learned of that, Gupta said, he pointed it out to record industry executives. Now, Napster has done the same in the case of the iTunes breach. “It’s tit for tat,” he noted.
Convenience Trumps Price
The goal with DRM systems, Gupta explained, is to make it more convenient for music downloaders to pay the fee than to spend time searching for the song for free. Jobs once made an off-hand comment that people should not settle for paying themselves minimum wage to steal music, Gupta noted. And Jobs and other downloadable music service executives are betting that this will continue to be true.
As far as threats to the music industry go, breaches of both the FairPlay and Windows systems pose fairly minimal risk. If a malicious hacker downloads 100 songs from iTunes, for example, and then strips their DRM code and makes them available on P2P networks, the license fee still has been paid one time.
In the case of Napster To Go, a hacker could do more damage, because the US$14.95 subscription fee allows for unlimited downloading. However, a person who wants the newest song released by a favorite artist is unlikely to want to spend the time finding that song on an illegal, P2P service. Rather, Gupta said, consumers are more likely to go ahead and pay the fee to get the song quickly and conveniently, and — as it turns out — legally.
