Interview with the man behind JHmyn

OSDir.com has an interview with FutureProof, the caretaker of
hymn, that nice little bit of hackery you can use to scrape off all the DRM nastiness Apple uses to copyprotect songs downloaded from the iTunes Music Store (he's also the creator of JHymn, an easier to use, Java-based version of hymn software). They've been playing a cat-and-mouse game with Apple lately, with every new version of iTunes usually including some sort of attempt to disable hymn from working. Most interesting part is where he talks about how stripping out the encryption is much easier than removing all of the watermarks from iTunes downloads:

JHymn seems to have done a pretty good job of removing that watermarking, but additional watermarks are cached
outside of the protected files themselves, in the iTunes Library database, perhaps on the iPod itself. Watermarking
can be much more clever than encryption. Whether Apple implements some of the trickier methods of watermarking is yet
to be seen.

At any rate, once DRM has been successfully removed from a file, you do have in your possession at that point a
perfectly "valid" AAC file that should play anywhere. Only Apple's software iTunes is going to be looking for Apple's
watermarking. You'll still have a file that can be played by any other AAC-compatible software or hardware.

Obviously Apple doesn't like what he's doing, since hymn and JHymn make it possible to share music you've bought from the iTunes Music Store with just about anybody, but he makes it clear that he believes that his "efforts aid piracy no more than the existence of CDs aid piracy."

[Via BoingBoing]