Somiatruites, Ciberderechos en la Red

A perro flaco todo son pulgas. Así le pasa a iTunes, la tienda de música de Apple. Hace unos días se sabía de una aplicación MyTunes que permite grabar música de streamming descargada desde el servicio. Un nuevo programa permite hacer lo mismo, pero en este caso se trata de una aplicación de código abierto, dispuesta para ser clonada, transformada, mejorada, etc. La ha desarrollado Jon Lech Johansen, la bestia parda de Hollywood. Johansen es el joven sueco al que se le atribuye ser el autor del DeCSS, el programa que sirve para romper la protección tecnológicas de los DVD y que permite, además de verlos en Linux, grabarlos. Lo cuentan en The Register, ‘DVD Jon unlocks iTunes' locked music’:

Jon Lech Johansen, better known as DVD Jon for his authorship of the DeCSS decryption software, has turned his attention to Apple's locked music format.

While he hasn't decrypted the DRM that Apple uses, he has produced a simple Windows command line utility which will install a DLL which dumps the output of a QuickTime stream to a file. The short C program is called "QuickTime for Windows AAC memory dumper". (To compile the program requires MinGW and MSYS - from here.)

An application called MyTunes already performs much the same function, but Johansen's is open source.

So let the fun and games commence: until OS vendors bring in portions of the 'trusted' architecture which Intel is building, such illuminating capers (such Great Deeds) are possible. (This isn't, as we foolishly thought earlier, the analog hole: the software isn't capturing the output of the sound card - it intercepts QuickTime playback before it has a chance to be 0wn3d (or however you spell it), by Hollywood. But it sets up an interesting confrontation.