“A notorious Norwegian hacker known as DVD Jon is preparing for another run-in with the music industry after he released software that lets iPod owners copy music and videos bought from iTunes and play it on other devices,” Jonathan Richards reports for The Times Online.
“The software breaks the copy protection – known as ‘digital rights management’ or DRM – that is built into all music that is bought from iTunes. Music bought from iTunes can be played only on the iPod,” Richards reports.
“DoubleTwist, DVD Jon’s company, maintains that its service is legal, but lawyers said that Apple would almost certainly seek to shut it down because the law now specifically targeted technologies which attempted to circumvent measures such as DRM,” Richards reports.
“The program gets around Apple’s DRM software by replaying a song in fast-forward and taking a copy of the audio track, using a process similar to that by which a CD is ‘ripped’ – or copied – to a computer,” Richards reports.
“Lawyers today [said] that the law had taken steps to protect Apple’s efforts to control the way its music could be played, and that anyone circumventing measures such as DRM risked being found guilty of copyright infringement,” Richards reports. “‘I would be astonished if doubleTwist doesn’t get a call from Apple,’ Paul Jones, a partner in intellectual property law at the London-based firm Harbottle & Lewis, said.”
More in the full article here.
