Real Networks Hacks iPod; .rm & Real Store for iPod 456
alphakappa writes "According to Cnet, Real Networks is expected to announce on Monday that it has found a way to make its songs play on the iPod. Now songs bought from the RealPlayer Music Store can be played on the iPod. Earlier Real had made it possible for songs bought from iTunes to be played on RealPlayer by transparently starting the iTunes authentication in the background. However since Apple has not licensed the technology to make file formats playable on the iPod, the latest Real initiative could be construed as reverse engineering. How would this fare under the DMCA? Or is it just for the tiny ones?"
nothing to see here (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple should let them fail in public (Score:5, Interesting)
Let 'em use the 'pod and win a major PR victory for not invoking the DMCA.
OT: If I could change the battery I would have bought an iPod, instead, as a backpacker I was forced to go to Sony's MiniDisk palyer/recorder, which I then fell in love with, despite the ATRAC3 Format, wich has evil DRM.
Re:What possible reason...? (Score:1, Interesting)
Competition (Score:3, Interesting)
so, does this mean that Real is guilty of (Score:4, Interesting)
so, does this mean that Real is guilty of INDUCEing [slashdot.org] users to commit a violation?
Delicious!
Should be under YRO (Score:3, Interesting)
Real Proof [jogin.com] - Apple users should be scared as f*** of letting real anywhere near their computers).
The reason I say this is because I just had a "fun" experience ove the weekend where Real One player deleted songs off my computer. I have a large inventory of mp3's that I legally ripped from CDs that I own. I recently bought a Palm T3 handheld, which comes with Real Player pre-installed.
I figured "why not" and installed Real One player. Made sure to un-check all the "Please contact me with special messages" and "please update me automatically" options...
Everything went great...for about 10 minutes. I was playing an mp3 and the sound was kind of fuzzy. So I stopped the playback to check some settings. When I went back to continue playing the songs, I received the dialog box "the song file you're requesting cannot be found!"
Ummm...wtf? I was just listening to it 30 seconds ago. I browsed to my network share where I keep my mp3's...it was gone. So, I jumped up to check actual server itself...it was for real...the file had disappeared from the harddrive! (incidentally, it's a RH 9 box running a samba share - maybe its some sort of bug in samba? Probably not (read on)).
Now, keep in mind that I had been playing these mp3s WinAmp and even Windos Media for over a year with no problem.
I lost 3 songs of which I had legally ripped from my own CDs, plus about 10 j-pop songs that I had downloaded only because they're not available in the US yet...something fishy is going on here.
The sad thing is that I actually prefer using their plugin for watching video clips, but now I'm thinking of switching to Windows Media...
Re:What possible reason...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, that is because the current trend towards "1984" is not coming from the Democrats or the Republicans. It is coming from the powerful corporations that have no term limits, no democratic votes, no national boundaries, and little oversight from the public.
We started down this slippery slope long ago when lawyers decided a corporation was an "entity" much like a human being, only without a natural lifespan, a brain, or a moral sense.
To all you morons... (Score:3, Interesting)
Both Nintendo and Sony have sued companies that reverse engineered their cartridge technologies (Nintendo) and various software functions (Sony on the PS). In all situations where it went to court, they lost.
Now these were pre-DMCA so who knows, but I do not see how Real is circumventing copy protection and that the DMCA applies at all in this situation. If you read the article, you will see that Real is actually adding the copy protection to achieve compatibility.
This is a copyright issue, pure and simple. And it is between FairPlay (the DRM that Apple licenses) and Real, not Apple and Real. If Real did a clean room implementation, the conversation is over and Real can continue.
Re:nothing to see here (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How this thing works... (Score:1, Interesting)
Jon's at it again... (Score:4, Interesting)
But our buddy Jon Johansen (of DeCSS fame) reimplemented it in 210 lines of C# code:
http://www.nanocrew.net/blog/apple/huntingplayfair .html [nanocrew.net]
Thanks Jon!
Your assumtions about what is legal are very wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Reverse engineering is not an illegal activity. And something created through the process of reverse engineering is not illegal, even under the DMCA. So what makes some reverse engineered products illegal?
a) They use too much of the original products copyrighted design, software, documentation, etc. This is what "clean room reverse engineering" is designed to avoid... and it does so successfully 100% of the time. Yes, its a guarantee that you will not infringe on the original work's copyright if you use this process.
b) They use trademarked design elements or logos from the original product. The latter is easy to avoid, the former is not so easy, and is something Apple talks about all the time. But I don't think that is something to be concerned about in this case.
c) They might infringe on patents owned or licensed by the producer of the original product. The clean room process can not help you here. You have to use patent lawyers to review the other company's patent portfolio and other patents related to the product. You might have to redesign your product to avoid infringing on the patent. There's a danger in reviewing patents though (treble damages if you screw up) so many companies take the "head in the sand" approach and completely ignore patents unless they hit them in the face. I don't think Apple has any patents in this area but I'm not really sure.
d) Violation of trade secrets. To avoid this, just don't use any former employees or internal documents from the original company. Be sure not to use corporate spies. This one shouldn't be an issue.
e) Contract violations. Be sure that you haven't agreed to any contracts with the other company that said you won't compete with them or reverse engineer their products (the latter clause may not be enforceable but it's not something you want to depend on).
f) DMCA violation. This is what everyone is talking about. If the product has little use except for bypassing the other company's copy and access controls (even for legitimate purposes) they can claim you are manufacturing and distributing a copy control circumvention device. The DMCA specifically says it is not intended to force everyone to implement everyone else's controls, but in practice this is a difficult legal determination to make. However I don't see how that applies to this case because no controls are being bypassed... Real's controls are equivalent to Apple's. (Unless Apple wants to claim that the controls were not to prevent copying but to prevent compatible players. In that case they are violating anti-trust law.)
So there you have it from a non-lawyer who has some chance of having a clue.
Re:What possible reason...? (Score:5, Interesting)
They might think that if the thing is too open, bad things can happen. There is precedent. Think of video game consoles. In the late 70's, early 80's, video games were big. There were arcades all over the place, and Atari, Mattel, and Coleco were thriving.
In 1982, the market collapsed. People stopped buying games. (And I got laid off as my cool Intellivision programming job at APh (the company that designed the Intellivision for Mattel) went away).
Years later, when Nintendo was considering coming out with the NES, they did a thourough study of what had caused that market collapse, so that they could avoid it.
Their conclusion was that the problem was too many companies were making games. Originally, only Mattel could product Intellivision games. Only Atari could make Atari games, and so on.
Later, Activision and Imagic were able to make games, but that was cool, because those companies were full of ex-Atari and ex-Mattel and ex-APh people. Their games were good, and the market grew.
After that, dozens of companies figured out how to make games for these systems, and they were crap. Nintendo's conclusion was that consumers just got tired of going in, plunking down a lot of cash for a game, and finding that it sucked. They couldn't tell the good stuff from the junk, and so stopped buying.
So Nintendo decided that for the NES to be viable, they had to be able to determine who could program for it. Perhaps Apple has decided that the same thing applies to portable music players.
Re:nothing to see here (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Apple have got to be laughing at this. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Apple have got to be laughing at this. (Score:2, Interesting)
Usually its the other way around though - you sell the hardware at a loss (eg XBox) and charge lots for the wares. So i guess you're right and apple just wants to sell hardware.
Re:What possible reason...? (Score:4, Interesting)
Second, it's "rein" in. Like a horse. A reign is a rule in terms of a king or a duke, not in terms of controlling a single individual.
Third, I liked ET on the atari. I had no problems beating the game. Sadly I think I may have actually been better at video games then. However, I absolutely hated Raiders of the Lost Ark, I never did manage to get the right angle on the bit where you parachute into a hole (yeah, I remember THAT scene from the movie) :P and thus I never could beat the thing. Also the tsetse flies were horrendous. To this day I don't know why ET flopped. There were plenty of crappy NES games in stores, but unlike the atari, enough people owned NESes and games were discounted far enough to where people would buy the crappy ones. Interestingly enough Kay-Bee Toys used to carry atari and NES games at the same time, and I can remember many cases where discounted NES games were cheaper than discounted Atari games, for no perceptible reason whatsoever. Perhaps Atari screwed themselves over some kind of minimum pricing agreements?
Re:Possibly legal, not Exactly Reverse Engineering (Score:5, Interesting)
IANAL but I work in the distribution end of the entertainment industry so I've had to pick up a more or less working understadning of copyright law.
if that understanding is correct, if Apple chooses not to sue, it does set a precedent. Not suing can be used by lawyers as a de facto acceptance of the practice, which in turn can be construted to be evidence that it isn't illegal. This is why Disney sues elementary schools that paint murals with Mickey Mouse; if they didn't, and someone made a hentai Minnie Does the Matterhorn film, Disney would have established a precedent that using their characters without permission is fine with them, and would have a much harder time in their lawsuit.
When the DMCA was written and adopted, it was acknowledged by the government as likely overbroad and that it would be up to the courts to work out the exact issues. So if Apple chooses not to sue, the courts then likely find that what Real did was not reverse engineering - they just don't work that out until the next time someone gets sued for a similar feat of reverse engineering.
So this is the Hobson's choice the DCMA visits upon Apple - either file an expensive lawsuit that will likely have backlash from industry intelligencia, or let it go and possibly open the door for all sorts of reverse engineering down the road - which is certainly good for consumers and engineers, but gives Apple less protection over its profit margins down the road, and could even lead to a class action lawsuit on behalf of the shareholders for not taking "vigorous" enough steps to protect intellectual property.
(Whether those protections are valid or not is left as an excercise to the reader, because it's sort of beside the point in terms of this discussion.)
Re:Get your IP law straight (Score:3, Interesting)
Older versions of Windows Supported? (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't seem to find a single mention anywhere of one of the major limitations of iTunes for Windows: It requires Windows XP. Older versions of Windows are not supported.
Given the enormous numbers of Windows '98 and Windows ME users still out there - this could be a huge score for Real.
Does anyone know if Harmony requires XP? Or if it requires a previous working install of iTunes? (which would effectively mean the same thing)
I wish I had mod points. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's a possibility: Real's program loads their DRMed files onto the iPod. Perhaps in the act of loading, it strips the DRM or mimics Apple's DRM. In the first case of stripping away the DRM, Real might take the position that loading the music is a one way move. Of course, we no otherwise, since an iPod is just a Firewire HD (among other things). Also, it should be pretty easy to fool the program, and load the music files onto other devices.
In the second case, mimicking Fairplay, Real would need to reverse engineer. But as you pointed out, this is not giving users any new uses of iTMS music files. It's not unDRMing files bought on iTMS. The reverse engineering is for program interoperability, and thus allowed under the DMCA.
There's a lot of confusion and misinformation out there concerning rights, digital or otherwise, so it's not suprising that a lot of people are going to be showing of their ignorance.