Browsing the website of the hymn (hear your music anywhere) project you’ll quickly come across the quote that should (but may not) encompass your rights to intellectual property that you purchase:

“The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but [t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” “To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art.”
– US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor

Copyright law has recently become outdated and not only have the rights consumers been exploited by major corporations, but the technology field itself has suffered. Creating code that encrypts an audio file is just as much of an achievement as creating the code that cracks the encryption. And that is where our game of cat and mouse begins.

The hymn project has created an application to which defeats the DRM used in Apple’s iTunes Music files. Like a ping-pong match the ball has bounced back and forth with Apple releasing new versions of iTunes encryption and hymn releasing new versions of its software to break that encryption - proving yet again that consumers are not only people willing to spend money. Consumers are people who acquire something and make it their own.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2004 at 7:26 pm and is filed under iTunes Encryption. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.