Uh-oh. Nokia isn’t going to like this. Its all-you-can-eat Comes With Music service is now open to piracy from pesky hackers, able to strip downloaded songs of their precious DRM, all for just a few quid.
It seems Comes With Music’s Microsoft-powered Digital Rights Management coding can be easily stripped away by Tunebite, a naughty bit of software available for just €20, or £17.50.
It works by playing tracks at speed and re-dubbing them into a non-encrypted file, rather than hacking the DRM in the traditional sense. But it can rip through tracks at 54 times their normal speed, so a song takes just a couple of seconds to be yanked free of Nokia’s protection.
Since Comes With Music lets users download as many tracks as they like for an entire year, it’s a huge vulnerability, and bound to have Nokia in a tizzy. But isn’t it about time music publishers saw sense and dropped DRM completely? The majority of users aren’t pirates. They simply want DRM-free tracks so they can listen to purchases on all their devices.
If only more of the industry was in the hands of DRM opponents, such as 7digital, play.com, TuneTribe and Amazon MP3 the world would be a better place.
Out now | £17.50 | Tunebite
