
As a DRM format becomes more widely used, the incentive to circumvent it grows when a proprietary DRM format is cracked, it is often an indication that the model has gained a toehold in the market. All forms of DRM suffer from an essential weakness: the people who copyright holders want to keep their content from are the same people they are giving it to (Doctorow 2004).

Like real-world locks, digital locks can be picked, broken, or circumvented. The history of most forms of DRM is a history of failure. MyFairTunes sets up fine but throws this error when I run the application under Wine: "install the Windows version of Mono to run. QTFairUse throws a "ImportError: MemoryLoadLibrary failed loading win32api.pyd" when using the console version and an "ImportError: MemoryLoadLibrary failed loading win32gui.pyd" when using the GUI version looks like I'll have to stick with Windows (ugh) for now. Neither of these programs work under Wine. Use the drag-and-drop interface to select which songs you want scrubbed and then click the button at the bottom to begin the conversion. Unzip the QTFairUse archive and launch the. (There is also another utility for doing this called myFairTunes and an older one that doesn't work anymore called JHymn). Next, download QTFairUse which is a utility that will scrub the DRM from your music files. I guess you could always use Wine or Virtualization inside Linux, but I don't have that set up yet - I'm just dual-booting Ubuntu Edgy and Windows XP). Besides, the DCMA sucks, too.)įirst, you're going to need Windows (sorry. But if you want to stick it to the man and protect your fair use rights, read on. (Disclaimer: doing this may be violating the DMCA. That is when I resolved to immediately blog about how to get around it (a mild form of protest, I know). m4p files are a iTunes-only, DRMed format.

All was good, until I tried to play the songs on another music player. I summarily went to the iTunes Music Store and downloaded about twenty-five bucks worth of Cannibal Corpse songs. Case in point: I just received a $25 dollar gift certificate from a loving relative who wanted me to buy some music.
