“If you want to spread bad news about Napster Inc., just tell Steve Jobs. The Apple Computer Inc. chief executive sent an e-mail Tuesday morning to top record industry executives, alerting them to a security gap in Napster’s music service — a rival to Apple’s iTunes online music store. ‘Thought you should know if you haven’t heard about this,’ Jobs wrote,” Jon Healey writes for The Los Angeles Times. “The e-mail directed the label executives to a Web page detailing how to convert Napster’s rental tunes into permanent downloads that can be burned onto CDs. The page urges people to sign up for a free trial of Napster and copy as much music as possible before canceling.”
Healy reports, “Napster CEO Chris Gorog sent the labels a retort Tuesday afternoon” arguing that “it is ‘trivial’ to download a free program that circumvents Apple’s anti-piracy software and unlocks ‘a large collection of iTunes music in seconds.'”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Of course, you would have to buy each song from Apple’s iTunes Music Store to be able to strip off the DRM. With Napster To Go, you could just sign up for the free 14-day trial and get to work stealing songs until your 14 days were up. Then, if you still wanted to steal some more songs, as in tens or hundreds of thousands, just sign up for a monthly subscription. This is the problem with a subscription service. Hint for music industry execs: if you can hear the music, the music can and will be recorded regardless of the DRM. The best way to make “rental” music’s DRM work is to rent music that people cannot hear or is of a quality that’s so bad it’s not worth recording. Does that sound like a good business model to you?
Don’t steal music.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Users thwart Napster To Go’s copy protection; do the music labels realize the piracy potential? – February 15, 2005
Napster-To-Go’s ‘rental music’ DRM circumvented – February 14, 2005
Napster CEO Gorog: ‘it’s stupid to buy an iPod’ – February 10, 2005
