QTFairUse6 shows a crack in DRM, but Apple shouldn’t worry

Chris Breen’s most recent iPod Blog post was about the cracking of Windows Media’s PlaysForSure DRM scheme. But Windows Media wasn’t the only DRM cracked in the last week: the current version of iTunes’s FairPlay has also been compromised. It’s been cracked in the past (most notably by Real’s Harmony and an app called Hymn), but Apple has constantly updated iTunes to change the scheme.

A new app appeared this week called QTFairUse6, which is an offshoot of Hymn that enables compatibility with iTunes 6.0. Should Apple be worried? Following Chris’s example, I decided to take QTFairUse6 for a spin. The short answer? Much as Chris found with the Windows Media crack, FairUse4WM, QTFairUse6 has enough drawbacks that Apple doesn’t need to circle the wagons quite yet. Follow me down the rabbit hole of DRM.

First off: QTFairUse6 only works on Windows. Mac users with Parallels or BootCamp can join the mix, but OS X users are out in the cold for the time being. I briefly toyed with the idea of installing the app in CrossOver, but my forays there proved to be overly complex. At the moment the app is a command line script written in the Python language, which requires you to install a couple of software packages to work correctly—there is what claims to be a GUI front-end called myTunes, but I couldn’t get it to work. None of this is beyond the reach of even your average user, but it’s still probably more trouble than they’ll go to.

But the two big hitches with QTFairUse6 are: 1) In order to grab the audio from your song it requires not only that the song be played back in iTunes, but that you authorize it with your account. That means that pirated tracks from the iTunes Music Store are useless without the username/password for an authorized account. You might be able to steal tracks from your friends, if they’re willing to give you their login information, but as it’s connected to credit card information, they may be less than forthcoming. 2) The time it takes to strip songs is prohibitive at present: QTFairUse6 can automatically decode every song in your iTunes library, but it does so in real time. Which means that 8:30 track of The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” will take 8 minutes and 30 seconds to decode.

Neither of these are insurmountable problems, but until the hackers manage to smooth them out, this is exactly what it claims to be: an exercise in Fair Use rights. And the next version of the iTunes app will no doubt change the scheme again, making this tool useless. It should, however, continue to be an important discussion point in the ongoing conversation on Digital Rights Management.