More Musik
p2pnet.net News:- Yesterday, we ran an item on the first release of Musik for music store clients.
Created by Cody Brocious, Travis Watkins and Alex Goodwin, it gets into iTunes and Napster.
But it’s not a ‘get ‘em for free’ application.
Rather, it strips them of their ability to include corporate DRM with purchases.
Derek Slater had an interesting chat with Brocious.
Read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The Cracking of Napster WMA DRM
By Derek Slater – A Copyfighter’s Musings
Cody and co. are apparently very near an implementation of a utility that will allow people to turn songs acquired through Napster Light (the a la carte service) and Premium (the non-portable subscription service) into unencrypted files. You have to have paid for the songs first to do this circumvention, because the keys have to be retrieved from Napster. This tool will actually circumvent and remove the DRM, rather than recording from the sound card or employing other similar workarounds to create unencrypted files.
The tool will not circumvent Napster To Go songs using Janus DRM, which is WMA DRM v10 and different from the DRM applied to Light and Premium songs. Their utility is indeed based on the Beale Screamer code document and only works with the WMA DRM code pre-v10. After the Beale Screamer code’s release, a tool called Freeme was released that decrypted WMA files, but MS updated WMA to account for this problem and secure the keys held client-side. Since the utility "requests the license from the Napster license server just like the official client does," this issue is inapplicable. Technically, this is distinct from the PyMusique crack for iTMS.
Cody suggests that Napster Light and Premium songs do not use the Janus DRM because of backwards compatibility issues. If Napster Light were to sell songs using Janus, the pre-Janus portable players (that is, most players on the market) would not be able to play the content. This issue does not apply to the non-portable Napster Premium; however, since Napster To Go only works with WinXP, I imagine that all Win2k users may have problems if Premium were to use Janus DRM.
So Napster could respond to this crack simply by updating all DRM to Janus, but it would come at great cost. Cody acknowledged other ways they could change the way they encrypt the content, but he believes these changes would be trivial to circumvent, assuming they do successfully implement the utility they are currently working on. He also expects that Janus will be cracked, but stated that he is not attempting to do so.
The tool will only work with Napster, but Cody expects that this scheme can be applied to other music stores in the future.
Cody sees his actions as "ethical," irrespective of legality, and he is willing to "fight the DMCA." He wants to be able to play his lawfully acquired Napster music on Linux.
Further technical details will be available shortly.
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See:-
first release – 1st PyMusique, now Musik, p2pnet, April 14, 2005
