UNINNOVATE / Engineering At Its Finest

In September 2006, Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM, used by online music stores like Rhapsody.com and Napster.com to prevent unauthorized copying of music, was cracked. A program called FairUse4WM was released that allowed users to unlock purchased music and copy it without restriction.

Microsoft quickly patched the vulnerability and sent updates to their PlaysForSure business partners. But before Microsoft’s partners were able to deploy the fix, an updated crack was released that nullified the fix and again left Microsoft’s partners with no effective copy protection.

In an attempt to slow the patch/crack cycle, Microsoft comically filed a lawsuit against against “John Does 1-10″ because they had no idea who was authoring the cracks. The author was only known by his or her online pseudonym - Viodentia. Unable to track down Viodentia, Microsoft was forced to give up and quietly dismissed the lawsuit.

Today, a user known as “Divine Tao” (clearly an anagram of Viodentia) posted a new version of FairUse4WM with an add-on application called “mirakagi”. The new version cracks music purchased from Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace and adds compatibility for Windows Vista. This will be especially upsetting to Microsoft because the Zune Marketplace’s optional subscription-based plan would allow a user to download thousands of tracks at very low cost and then unlock them with FairUse4WM and keep them forever.

Microsoft will no doubt respond quickly because they believe that their business model depends on having effective DRM in place. However, there is good evidence to refute this claim, at least for pay-per-track downloads - the largest part of Microsoft’s business . Emusic.com doesn’t use DRM to protect the music it sells, yet it has been far more successful in the marketplace than any store that uses Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM system or the Zune Marketplace.

Once again, let’s go back to December 3, 2003:

None of this technology that you’re talking about’s gonna work. We have Ph.D.’s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don’t believe it’s possible to protect digital content.

What’s new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet — and no one’s gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock — open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock.

- Steve Jobs, The Rolling Stone Interview