the mighty iTunes mp4 protection has been cracked! from seidai software comes FairGame, software that will convert the songs you purchased on an iTunes store to an unprotected format - keeping all original metadata, artwork, lyric, and album information intact. fairgame has several pre-requisites before it can be used, like having iMovie HD installed and enabling ‘access for assistive devices’ in the universal access control panel. only works on a mac with OSX. but nice to see this happening. buying music from the apple store is like buying a CD that will only play on one specific type of player. kind of nuts, and also kind of a recipe for a monopoly. doesn’t everyone know that the archos media players are worlds better than any ipod (thanks tony!)?. i’m serious. linky via boingboing via thornography.
Also, adrienne sent in this report the other day from BBC, titled itunes copy protection cracked. as music downloaded from an itunes store can ONLY be played on an ipod, the code that prevents music downloaded from Apple’s iTunes store being played on any portable player other than an iPod has been “cracked”. this reverse-engineering has been done by Jon Lech Johansen. his company DoubleTwist hopes to distribute the cracking code to other media player producers. that is great news.