Removing napster copyright (.wma files)

Wrong, there are tools that can strip off the encryption from a WMA file if the user has the license data on his machine. This only works for the current version of WMA (version 2) but not for the old one. Needless to say: the stripping process if lossless, so you won't get reencoding artifacts.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Rock

The point is, it's much more convenient to just pirate mp3 (or other non-protected) versions of the music, especially since moral issues aren't of any concern here.

But that was not the question here. The question was if it was possible to remove the copy protection from WMA files. And the answer is yes if some conditions are given.
And don't talk about morals here. As I already said you can only decode the file if you own the license for the file. Without the license the file is not readable and you would need brute-force decryption to get your data (and with the current keylength this could take years). So DRM stripping is only available to you if you already legally own the file. And if I own the file and want to play it on say my standalone in my opinion I have the right to strip off DRM to get the file playing in my standalone.

Originally Posted by Rock

Also, could you link to that tool?

No, sry - I won't give any links here, but you can quickly find a lot of material on google. Probably you will only find sourcecode that you've to compile yourself, a huge obstacle for the normal user. There is also another problem that is depending on security bugfixes provided by ms that render the application non-operational - so you've to use a virtual machine to get this working.

Does this sound complicated? Yes and indeed, it is. But I didn't say it was easy, only that is was technically possible.

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I have my reasons galen and the german law concerning the circumvention of copy protections is one of them. I'm a bit paranoid about this topic and I'm not going to change that (partly because of some events involving a fellow student and the police...)

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

We're already quite off-topic, so why not end this discussion here. I think I can decide myself in which boards I hang out and how much information I provide there. I'm only cautious.

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