October 22, 2003
Berkeley Researchers on DRM (and Windows iTunes DRM)
Deirdre Mulligan and Aaron Burstein of Berkeley’s Samuelson Clinic and John Han of SIMS have released, “How DRM-based Content Delivery Systems Disrupt Expectations of ‘Personal Use'”, in which they test and evaluate the DRM of various music services. If you haven’t read Mulligan and Burstein’s previous papers on DRM, see the links in this post.
The new paper notes that iTunes prevents ripped songs from being reburned to CD. I had never heard of this before, so I decided to test if it were true for the Windows version. In my tests using iTunes to do the initial burning, MusicMatch to do the ripping, and Easy CD Creator to do the reburning, I was able to create fully functional, DRM-free MP3s. I also successfully captured audio as it was outputted to the soundcard using TotalRecorder.
Filed by Derek Slater at 12:29 am under General news
3 Comments
Hi Derek… could you cite where the paper says this specifically about iTunes? [I’ll check back on these comments later…] If you’ll note the Appendix, they have “# of CD burns per purchase” for “iTunes” as “Infinity” (an “8” on its side).
Page 5, left column, second paragraph:
“iTunes enforces the additional limitation that ripped versions of its tracks cannot be reburned to CD by making these files non-readable using some CD burning software.”
I guess the “some” is pretty qualifying… I’ll send some electrons to John Han and see if he can respond personally. Of course, keep up the damn fine blogging.