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It will be a war that goes on for years and years. The war on terror ? No, the war on Microsoft Digital Rights Mgmt. G O O D M O R N I N G S I L I C O N V A L L E Y Last updated: Monday, October 22, 2001, 8:30 a.m. Microsoft's digital rights management technology suffered another blow last week when a programmer using the pseudonym "Beale Screamer " distributed a piece of code capable of removing content protections from Windows Media Audio (.wma) files. The release of the software, entitled freeme.exe, was accompanied by a positioning statement entitled "Mad as Hell About the DMCA." In it, "Screamer" rails against the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and decries Digital Rights Management policies like those employed in Windows Media Audio. "When I buy a piece of music (not rent it, and not preview it), I expect (and demand!) my traditional fair use rights to the material. I should be able to take that content, copy it onto all my computers at home, my laptop, my portable MP3 player, ... basically anything I use to listen to the music that I have purchased," Screamer writes. "I can't do this at all with Microsoft's DRM scheme... As long as publishers insist on removing our rights in a traditional sale, we will continue to fight back with technical and legal measures." Microsoft seems unconcerned with Screamer's threats and already has begun distributing code to render Screamer's code ineffective. "We have been forthright that no technology and no DRM is 100 percent secure," Microsoft Group Product Manager Jonathan Usher told News.com. "We anti- cipated... hacks and designed renewability into the system." http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/22354.html http://cryptome.org/ms-drm.htm http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7590303.html?tag=mn_hd http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/mad.html
