A German company is offering what it claims is a legal method of making iTunes Music Store music playable on devices other than the iPod. RapidSolution Software claims its Windows-only software, Tunebite, "legally provides the user with new music files without restrictions".

iTunes Workaraound

Tunebite

Wow, analog transcoding. Of course the average consumer doesn't even know what transcoding is and how it damages audio quality. They are simply re-compressing an already compressed track by playing it back through the analog portion of the soundcard. Not to mention the additional noise that is potentially added along the way.

edit: spelling

Well they do.

However this is the only legal way to copy a CD or a file which is protected by copy protection or DRM (in Germany).

It's prohibited to circumvent any copy protection. As a last stand of consumers there is still a plea for fair use rights but sadly it didn't change the EU Copyright Directive.

deutsch:
Petition für die Privatkopie!

english:
Fair Use for the European Union!

Heise c't site for more information on protected unCD's:
UnCD's und legale Kopie von kopiergeschützten Werken

regards,
Tas.

Can't this also be considered circumventing copy protection? If you indeed are making a copy of a DRM:ed file, aren't you circumventing the copy protection? I really can't see the difference but then I am not a lawyer.

Jesus.. so under the new law you are not allowed to record the sounds coming out of your speakers? This does not sound very sane to me

Hello,
of course it IS allowed to record the sounds that come out of your speakers !
And because of this , the Tunebite software is fully legal ...

But it is against the law to "crack" a copy-protection to get a non-DRMed file ...

Regards,
56W11.

...but hang on, it's illegal to use a VCR with an AGC that is immune to macrovision and make an analog copy of a DVD.

where is the difference here?

not that i'm against fair use (of course not...), but i'm saying that an analog workaround is not a guarantee against being flayed alive by the recording industry.

does that mean songs recorded off FM radio can be shared on p2p networks?

Well of course I didn't mean that, I was just pondering over what the music industry might have to say about it. Anyway, all this just shows how futile copy protection is. With a good sound card I guess you could get a quality good enough for the average-non-HA-or-audiophile-listener with this method. And if it is legal, so what is the point of copy protecting it really? Also, there is the method of burning it to CD and ripping again, where you only will have the loss of transcoding.

But that is a different issue. That is (il)legal distribution, not cirumventing any copy protection.

Put it this way iTunes circumvents the DRM by allowing the burning of a CD, from which you can get an exact 1:1 no loss rip.

You have the right to make personal copies of analog sources!
Or play a protected digital source and record the analog output thus not 'cracking' the protection.

You have no right to do so with digital sources if they are protected in any way.
Which means a 1:1 replica of a protected digital source.

Got it?

regards,
TAS.

As i said before. If you play it back and record the analog output it's fine.

Files protected by Digital Rights Management may grant you the right to burn them on a CD. In this case you (or iTunes) does not circumvent the protection. The owner can decide which rights it will grant (how often you may play the song, where you may play the song, if you can burn the song on cd etc).

Example: If you buy a DRMed Song it may be accompanied with the right to burn this song three times on a CD.
After the 3 times you can't and are not allowed to burn it again.

TAS.

Depends on the wording of the law. The DMCA, to pick an example, talks about "bypassing a copy protection measure". It makes no distinction between directly attacking the encryption or recording the analog signal or what have you.

The DMCA includes provisions for Fair Use as well, so using a program like Hymn to unprotect a song is exactly as legal or as illegal as burning a CD and ripping or recording from line out to line in. In the DMCA, how you make the copy is unimportant, it's why you make the copy that counts. Fair use provisions still apply.

The DMCA goes a step further and makes dissemination of information on how to bypass copy protection mechanisms a crime in and of itself. So distributing Hymn, for example is illegal under the DMCA. However, by the same token, telling somebody to burn a CD and then rerip it is just as illegal. One is definitely speech, the other is binary code and may or may not be speech depending on who you ask, that's the only difference between them.

Since when you tell somebody how to bypass a copy protection measure, you're not actually making a copy yourself, then you're not violating copyright by doing so. However, this means that Fair Use is suddenly no longer a valid defense for you. You didn't make a copy, you just told somebody else how to do so. This is why the DMCA is such a bad law.

My comments apply for Germany.

cheers.

Otto pretty much nailed it on the head for the US. AFAIK, there's no actual precedent on circumventing the DMCA through analog recording, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if commercial software to do this would be considered a violation while individuals doing it on their own accord would not be.

Federal Courts have been fairly even-handed in their application of the DMCA, given the circumstances. They've tended to look for if a commercial enterprize was directly benefitting from facilitating restricted use of copyrighted material, which would appear to be the case with this software.

Don't know the law in Germany, but if there aren't any actual cases so far on commercial software that automaticaly records the analog source, then I'd be careful about jumping to conclusions as to how they'll rule.

Well, I worded my response badly and got off topic. What I was trying to say was that it highly depends on the wording of the law. I find it hard to believe that the German law that restricts somebody from bypassing copy protection makes a digital/analog distinction. Admittedly, I have not read the law in question, and I don't know German anyway so that probably wouldn't help.

This sort of thing is exactly why I hate the legal system. You can't do this, unless you do it this way, but you can't tell anybody how to do it, unless you tell them with source code, but it can't be compiled.

Would you get an exact copy of the protected file if you ripped it back to AAC using iTunes? Would this not suffer from sampling errors/phase problems?

Could someone tell me if this is similar to recoding a digital audio file via WAV?

A moot point IMHO. Women were not allowed to vote at some point either. The effort wasted in trying to transcode originals through this method should rather be put to use by organizing against such a pointless law.

While I can understand where you are coming from since the RIAA and other groups will undoubtably come up with some legal wording to attempt to sue users of tunebite, I think it performs extremely well. I have not noticed any noticeable difference in the quality. I also feel that they would have a rough road to travel in pursuing lawsuits since technically I don't see how they can claim that DRM is being manipulated or defeated using the application. What are they gonna do, require DRM technology to be included at the speaker to prevent it from working? They would totally tick off the remainder of the music enthuisists out there and further destroy the music industry.

Your mention of FM stations being recorded and shared...It was very interesting while the RIAA suits were in the spotlight, this very question came up. They (RIAA) and artists acted as though they did not care about that because they felt the inferior quality made the issue a mute point.

You made very interesting points.

You say that now, but that is indeed one of the serious proposals put forth by the industry. To create a new standard where the speaker, instead of receiving an analog signal, receives an encrypted digital signal. The speaker has some hardware to decrypt it and a built in amp and then plays back the signal.

This idea has been seriously proposed several times by the recording industry as a way to "protect their intellectual property". The fact that the idea is dumb as hell doesn't change their desire to have more control over your hardware.


Quality or not, what I've seen is that most artists don't care *anyway*. Music piracy doesn't hurt artists. Not really.

There are exceptions, of course. Some artists care quite a bit about their music being shared between people. Of course, I usually stop listening to those artists when I hear about it. I find that they've gotten too pretentious for me to be able to take anything they say seriously anymore.

Nothing wrong with the legal system, it has to apply the laws passed by Congress, and Congress chose to enact the monstrosity that is the DMCA.