Jon Johansen (known for his work in defeating CSS in DVDs) has recently released an application known as DoubleTwist. DoubleTwist is designed to defeat Apple’s FairPlay DRM by playing the track’s in fast forward and capturing the analog signal as it leaves the sound card. In addition to stripping the DRM from songs, it allows users, through a Facebook application, to share songs with their friends.<\/p>\n
Circumventing FairPlay in this manner arose due to the “Analog hole” that exists for most media in existence today. The bottom line is that for human senses to perceive the media in question, it has to be in an analog format with no protection at some point in the playback. Since there is no reasonable way to prevent this kind of attack on DRM, it seems it would be more beneficial to be able to detect if the attack had been performed and pursue the individual in question. If the media carried a watermarking code that was durable enough to withstand copying and most removal attacks while still identifying the source user, most people would be unwilling to share their media lest they be sued for copyright infringement.<\/p>\n
Copyright law has been another issue that’s been complicating the use of DRM. In particular the idea of fair use is rather murky when it comes to implementation in DRM. In the US, it’s generally considered fair use to make back-up copies of media that you own however there is little to prevent people from passing on their backup copies to other people.<\/p>\n
Apple’s long term response to this development will be to update their DRM scheme to prevent fast-forwarding of media to slow the copying of music protected by FairPlay. In the interim however they will likely try to find some legal recourse against the authors of DoubleTwist and possibly Facebook for allowing the application to be used. My hope is that Apple will do neither of these things and instead abandons DRM in favor of watermarking.<\/p>\n
Source
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Jon Johansen (known for his work in defeating CSS in DVDs) has recently released an application known as DoubleTwist. DoubleTwist is designed to defeat Apple’s FairPlay DRM by playing the track’s in fast forward and capturing the analog signal as … Continue reading