Napster Has Been Cracked 616
Sabathius writes "Users have found a way to skirt copy protection on Napster Inc's portable music subscription service just days after its high-profile launch, potentially letting them make CDs with hundreds of thousands of songs for free...""
Re:Whatever (Score:3, Interesting)
Bollocks - you're assuming you have complete control of the execution environment. That is not the case on some platforms (cellphones springs to mind) and there are incentives (I'm sure you know the acronym) to make a "secure platform" within our normal open platforms to reach the same goal.
Not possible according to Microsoft (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunately after DMCA it is illegal to demonstrate that this is not the case.
The music industry should sue Microsoft for misleading them to publish millions of songs in a basically unprotected format.
Re:Aw Crap (Score:5, Interesting)
Possible workarounds for them:
Re:Sounds like it's time for the RIAA... (Score:2, Interesting)
So it appears that they are at least a MITE worried about the old "non-profit" days of Napster coming back...only with a MUCH better search engine, and all with the SAME quality!
Re:Old News (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Old News (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Man... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Really lossy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Analog Hole (Score:3, Interesting)
They are recording the output, en route to the speakers. This is called the analog hole. (If you can hear it, you can record it.)
There is a strong effort by content companies to close the analog hole. How? By controlling access to analog-to-digital conversion hardware through new laws.
That's right, it may one day be illegal to use a D/A converter any way you want.
Read the top article here. [http]
Re:Old News (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, many people do consider the law wrong in this case. Not your meaning, but your choice of phrasing came out all too conveniently ambiguous.
The problem here involves the length of copyright, and the sources of "real" creativity...
First, publishing and distribution have become much easier and cheaper than when the idea of copyrights first entered the law. As a result, you don't need word of mouth and 20 years of slow trickle to get a new book/album/whatever out to the public, it takes hours to months. The vast majority of the profit that will eventually derive from sales, comes in within a year or two. So, considering that, why has the duration of copyrights increased rather than decreased? At present, I would say that even a decade should suffice.
But, the standard comback goes, why shouldn't the "creator" of a work get to keep copyrights forever?
That goes back to my comment on the source of creativity. People do not create new content in a vacuum. They do so as part of a specific culture, with a cultural heritage on which to draw (and theoretically contribute to). As an example, how much "modern" music have you heard that uses, almost verbatim, one (or more) of the voices of Pachelbel's Canon in D? So, if you play classical music on an electric guitar and rap to it, does that really count as a "new" song for which you deserve royalties for the next few centuries? Going further, the entire style of music that people will tolerate (and buy) depends heavily on the culture as well. How do you think the same audience that hissed at Brahm's 1859 Leipzig performance of his first piano concerto (now "generally regarded as one of his most romantic works"), would have reacted to, say, Metallica? Or how do you suppose the puritans would have received Ozzy (I suspect "warmly", in the bonfire sense). Artistic creations depend on their culture to have value. They represent miniscule additions to that culture, not giant leaps that would warrant such enormous legal protections. Or to put it another way, they don't have value because of their uniqueness, but precisely because of their almost total lack of uniqueness, with a tiny grain of novelty thrown in.
So, does this justify pirating music? That depends... Do you believe you have the right to access your own culture; or, do you believe that others have the right to lock your own culture away from you and make you pay to experience it?
Re:Damn...must not be very high quality songs... (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, wouldn't this boost the value of music bought by neo-Napster for the consumer, and thus increase sales ?
"Oh no, our DRM has been broken ! Now all the people who want to burn their own CD's or just down't like DRM will consider us a viable choice of getting music from ! Oh, woe are us !"
Of course, it's possible that the record labels will pull their music now...
The Real Reason this was Reported (Score:3, Interesting)
The timing of this not-new-news release, right when Napster's new monthly flat-fee subscription service debuts, was no accident. It was meant to hit Napster on Wall Street, and as of this writing in early trading it's already paltry stock price is down over 2% on the news.
Re:Impact? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Man... (Score:2, Interesting)
Who it thier right mind (Score:3, Interesting)
Im sure the 128 of Napster is probably equiv to about a 160, but that really still isn't good enough, particularly when you consider that your buying a crippled version (Which is fine if they could guarentee that there will always be mp3 players, portable and computer based) and to keep your going to have to burn/rip which is going to kill all definition that the original song had. If I buy something digitally I expect to be able to keep it,
I'd rather donate $2 per track to the artist and download off a dodgy P2P app than pay any music company $1 and be forced to re-buy it when they decide that its time for a new music tech and for everybody to re-buy thier old music.
Re:What they actually mean is... (Score:2, Interesting)
Why Bother? (Score:2, Interesting)
There's nothing on Napster that can't found elsewhere on the internet without charge. The free choices are usually encoded at a higher bite rates. They're not encumbered with Digital Rights Management and the overall quality is usually better.
Don't waste your time with crippled audio formats. If you really like the stuff, go buy the CD and rip it yourself.
If you are going to pay $15 a month for a subscription, you are probably better off with XM Radio (which is also rippable).
Re:Specialist Subject: the Bleeding Obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
I love that they admit that SAP doesn't make it actually impossible for untrusted applications to get access to the unencrypted audio. Just virtually impossible. And of course it only takes one dedicated person to figure out how to weasel through that tiny sliver of opportunity afforded by "virtually impossible," and SAP is blown wide open. Just like every other DRM scheme. Ever.
Of course, people like to trumpet Palladium and such things as the ultimate cure, without realizing that A) you still have access to the physical hardware, and B) does anyone really think Microsoft -- Microsoft -- is going to be able to implement such a complicated security scheme without making any mistakes that allow people to hack it?
Re:Only true for lossless codecs (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Quality (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Man... (Score:4, Interesting)
Click here to see the original post I made on this [cdfreaks.com]
Anyhow, I hope you all are enjoying it. I merely wanted to transcode the files I had bought (3207 and climbing....) so I could load them on a non-WMA-aware MP3 player like any other piece of music I own. I certainly didn't intend for Napster to start a 14-day free trial, nor did I expect this method to get "out into the wild" (although, posting on the internet is no way to keep anything secret.....). I would like to take this moment and kindly remind you all that unless you actually *buy* some tracks, Napster loses money. Napster loses enough money, they'll fold shop. The artists will then get reamed by iTunes. Don't let it happen guys, lets at least try to be honest.
--warlock1711 of club cdfreaks.