Hacking the iTunes Music Store
Seems like a day for iTMS reverse engineering today.
Aaron Swartz has
an excellent paper online explaining how to circumvent Apple's DRM in iTMS. And the good people at
downhillbattle.org put up
a script to query the iTMS without iTunes. Among the uses they propose for this
freely downloadable software are some nice ideas such as this one:
We're able to get the "copyright" information from Apple's XML, so that means we know the record label that released each song (musicians usually don't even control the copyrights to their own work). Since we have the label names, we can check those against a list like the one maintained by RIAA Radar to see if that label is an RIAA member or--even worse--one of the Big 5 labels that runs the RIAA. Once we make this script developers can integrate it into filesharing clients, and we'll always know what we should and shouldn't pay for.
Posted by jens at April 19, 2004 03:55 PM