The rumors are rampant this morning about an imminent, cross-the-board iTunes Plus (DRM-free) price cut. Previously, all Plus tracks had been listed at $1.29, not the usual $0.99 for DRM "protected" media. That premium delivers 256kbps quality tracks for you to play on any device supporting AAC playback. Of these tracks, nearly all were from EMI or just a handful of Indies. Now, presumably in response to launch of Amazon's MP3 store which prices DRM-free tracks at $0.89 or $0.99, Apple appears ready to cut the price of all Plus tracks to $0.99. As the rumor goes, we should see more Indie's shed their DRM sometime this week, if not today.

[Via MacRumors]

Know Your Rights is Engadget's new technology law series, written by our own totally punk copyright attorney Nilay Patel, of the Chicago firm Agency 68. In it we'll try to answer some fundamental tech-law questions to help you stay out of trouble in this brave new world. Disclaimer: Although this post was written by an attorney, it is not meant as legal advice or analysis and should not be taken as such.


Why're you doing a KYR on fair use? It's all right there in the name, isn't it?

If only it were that simple. Like so many other legal terms, the hardest thing about understanding fair use isn't how it works, but rather that it has such an appealingly simple name -- one that seems to invite a lot of off-the-cuff interpretation.

Well, that's stupid. Why not just make it simple?

Because then lawyers would be out of their jobs, obviously.

That can't be the reason.

Yes, but it's much funnier than the real one.

Ok Fair Use advocates, listen up. EMI senior VP Lauren Berkowitz has just given her initial sales report following their much ballyhooed DRM-free launch on iTunes Plus last month. The results? Well, "good" is the word she used to summarize sales. During the first week of availability, sales of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon were up 350 percent. Even now, after all the initial excitement, sales remain 272 percent higher. To a lesser degree, other EMI artists are also riding the DRM-free, download bump; even while their respective CD sales have tailed off. For example, downloads for Norah Jones' Come Away with Me are up some 24 percent while CD sales have dropped 33 percent. Still, the DRM-free tracks were launched only three weeks ago which is far too early for any kind of proper trend analysis. We also don't have any correlating data to demonstrate an increase (or decrease) in piracy -- something the record labels will likely weigh in equal importance. Things do look promising though, eh?

[Via Ars Technica]

We knew it was imminent after this morning's iTunes software update. Now, after all our collective bitching and moaning, they're here: DRM-free tracks on Apple's iTunes Plus store. Sure, there are plenty of other on-line music stores offering similar 256kbps AAC quality music, DRM-free for less than a $1.29 iTunes Plus cost per track ($0.30 upgrade for each song already downloaded or about $3.00 for "most albums"). Ok, still no Beatles tracks and we're only talking about EMI music for now, but this is iTunes kids -- the big download daddy of on-line music. Now put down that BitTorrent client and get out there and support Fair Use kids, the future is yours.

Legal analysis courtesy of Scott McMillan, Zachary Sharpe, and Trevor Adler of The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review.


The press and blogosphere have recently been abuzz over programs that remove copyright protections technologies known as Digital Rights Management (DRM) from purchased or rented media files. These DRMs restrict a consumer's use of the media – morality notwithstanding, they are the only thing preventing you from copying your music or video files onto all of your friends' computers. DRM-stripping programs remove such restrictions from the file (and typically violate your terms of service agreement, to say the least). In September, Microsoft filed suit against the hacker(s) responsible for one such DRM-stripping program, FairUse4WM, purportedly created by the now notorious Viodentia. Other such programs reportedly target the DRM protections of the iTunes Music Store and AllOfMP3, among others. What will become of Microsoft's lawsuit? What does this have to do with "fair use" and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)? What follows is a brief overview in two parts. In the first, we'll discuss current issues surrounding fair use with regard to the DMCA, and in the second we'll approach Microsoft's legal actions against Viodentia for FairUse4WM.

What fair use is, and how it works alongside the DMCA

"Fair use" is a doctrine under US copyright law that permits certain acts that might otherwise be considered copyright infringement. Copyright law gives authors the right to exclude others from their work, and can sometimes get in the way of the ultimate goal of copyright, which is to promote progress in art and science. The theory here is that without copyright protections, many artists and authors would be discouraged from distributing their work. The fair use exception allows copyright protections to remain in place while enabling consumers some degree of freedom in their use of purchased media. For example, it was generally understood that ripping CDs for personal use was legal because it fell under the fair use exception. However, fair use was dealt a serious blow with the enactment of the DMCA in 1998 and the widespread use of DRM protections. Indeed, fair use is not a defense to a DMCA claim.

Mere days after Microsoft started pushing a new IBX version for "protecting" PlaysForSure files from its users, the FairUse4WM guys have thrown down a new version that deals with that and other little DRM-circumvention obstacles. The new release -- version 1.2 -- knocks out DRMv1 files you've ripped yourself with protection, breaks down individualized WM9 files and has a workaround for WM11beta2. Of course, we're guessing it won't be long until Microsoft has another quick update to break FairUse4WM again, but it seems like a more drastic update might be in order to shut down this hack for good. We're sure you're well familiar with our stance on this whole issue, and hope that version 1.2 treats you right.

Earlier this week we told you about the first tool we've yet heard of that strips the FairPlay DRM from the iTunes Music Store v6 tracks you bought, called QTFairUse. Unfortunately, because this tool was still very raw and in Python, so it didn't seem entirely there yet for the rest of us; well, today we're one step closer with myTunes, a small (50KB), simple, graphical Windows app designed to strip the DRM off your iTunes tracks lickety split. Based on the QTFairUse Python code (and not that of the original myTunes from way back in the day), this app unfortunately only strips DRM in real time, meaning that while it automates the process as you churn through your playlist, it also requires you to play through your library song by song (compared to FairUse4WM, which strips PlaysForSure DRM en masse). Also, after the FairPlay has been stripped, you still have to use another tool to reconstruct your track from your raw AAC file (which also means you have no metadata). In other words, even though this tool simplifies a lot of the process, it's still also a huge pain to use, so you'd better be prepared to bust out some shell scripting until the next version of myTunes is released (when they intend to automatically add the headers and metadata, making it a one step process). But it did most definitely work, click on to get an idea of what you're in for with this early version of myTunes.

[Thanks, Pete]

Leave it to the Hawthorne Effect, right? It's been three days since we spilled the beans about the PlaysForSure-stripping FairUse4WM app, and already Microsoft's Windows Digital Media Division is issuing notices to its PlaysForSure licensees regarding patching up the problem. It's a little difficult for the likes of us to decode, but check it out for yourself, we've printed the letter in its entirety (sans email addresses) for your perusal. From what we can glean, Microsoft's prepared to combat this "new circumvention tool" by patching the individualized blackbox component (IBX) in PlaysForSure either as a push down through the software, or as an update available in the near future to Windows users. We won't butcher the technical nuances of this one any further though, so we'll let you guys see what's what and figure out how to keep everyone in the Fair Use fair use loop. Either way, guess it looks like Microsoft wasn't listening to our pleas; are you there Bill? It's us, Engadget.

XM is firing back against the recording industry's lawsuit over the Pioneer Inno's ability to temporarily store copyrighted material, stating rather boldly in an open letter to its customers that "we will vigorously defend these radios and your right to enjoy them in court and before Congress, and we expect to win." Claiming that the record labels "don't get it," XM argues that consumers have always been free to tape over-the-air content from a variety of sources, provided that they restrict those recordings to personal use. What's more, the Inno doesn't even let you transfer recorded content to other devices, and deletes all of your tunes if you drop your XM subscription, so it's already much more restrictive than the recording devices faced by TV and terrestrial radio broadcasters. Instead of actually expecting XM to pay $150,000 for each song recorded by Inno users (which would probably amount to at least several billion dollars), it's more likely that the music industry is using this suit to coax XM into joining rival Sirius in coughing up additional licensing fees. Also, a note to XM PR: despite your suggestion that the record labels are attacking sat radio owners at the expense of a war on the "real" pirates, we think that the industry is both well-prepared and well-equipped for a multi-front conflict.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]