Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Cody Brocious is a 17-year old 11th grader from Chamberburg, Pa., and like many other teens he loves his iPod and uses the iTunes music store to buy music.

Brocious likes using the Linux operating system more than he does Microsoft's Windows or Apple Computer's Mac OS. But Apple doesn't make software that would let Linux users like Brocious buy songs from the iTunes store, so he did what any 21st-century teen raised in the digital age would do — he and his friends wrote a program to do so themselves.

One of those friends is Jon Johansen, a Norwegian who in 1999 drew the ire of the Motion Pictures Association of America for creating a software program designed to circumvent the copy-protection technology on DVDs.

What they came up with is a program called PyMusique, which hit the Web about two weeks ago. It lets Linux desktop users buy — not steal — music files from iTunes. One unintended consequence of their program is that it saves the songs without the built-in copy-protection code, meaning that songs can be copied to other devices at will.

Brocious says that stripping the Digital Rights Management technology from iTunes songs happened more or less by accident. He first assumed that the copy protection was attached directly by the iTunes server itself. Had that been the case, he says, PyMusique would have left it intact, meaning the program would be subject to the same copy restrictions to which all iTunes users are subject.