Information wants to be free and all of that:
- When Apple opened the iTunes Music Store, they licensed a technology called "FairPlay" from a company called "Veridisc". FairPlay is a Digital Rights Management (DRM) system that limits a users rights on a digital media file that they've purchased and presumably downloaded. In the case of Apple's iTunes Music Store, when a user downloads an audio track from iTMS, it is a "Protected AAC Audio File". When used as intended, these files can only be played through the iTunes program itself. Furthermore, a particular computer must first be "authorized" to play the given file. FairPlay allows up to three computers and unlimited Apple iPods to be authorized to play the file. As DRM schemes go, FairPlay is only moderately offensive.
So what will playfair do for you? The playfair program is quite simple. It takes one of the iTMS Protected AAC Audio Files, decodes it using a key obtained from your iPod or Microsoft Windows system and then writes the new, decoded version to disk as a regular AAC Audio File. It then optionally copies the metadata tags that describe the song, including the cover art, to the new file.
Death to DRM, and stuff.
Article comments
1 - Hal Pawluk
Information wants to be free
It had nothing to do with intellectual property rights.TANGENTIAL TRIVIA: The original concept was that information wants to be expensive because of its value but costs were getting lower and lower. Here's what the originator, Stewart Brand, said about it in 1999:
FYI.
2 - Eric Olsen
I'm just passing the news on - I think it's interesting that this quote has been appropriated by those who would remove barriers to information, whether that was its original context or not.
3 - Hal Pawluk
I dropped that in simply as an interesting side-light, no ax to grind.
The transition to using only part of the latter half of the original statement happened pretty quickly, and by 1990 you were hearing "Information wants to be free" used as a stand-alone phrase and concept with some regularity.
I do wonder why music should be free while books shouldn't and drug companies can extend their copyrights almost indefinitely by slightly tweaking a drug and giving it a new name.
But that's an entirely different discussion :-)
4 - Eric Olsen
Thanks for the info!
I don't think any copyrighted material should be "free," but at this point it should "feel" a lot closer to free than the copyright industry wants. AND, "copyright" has become something far too akin to "in perpetuity" - it's time for the pendulum to swing back the other way.