James Delahunty
18 Feb 2005 3:44
Napster has officially denied rumours that its music has been hacked. A posting on Engadget.com detailed how a user could get music from the Napster To Go service and convert the protected WMV files to WAV files which can then be burned to CD. The Napster to go service allows you to download all the music you want for $15 a month but does not allow you to burn the music to CD, because if you stop paying the subscription fee, you will lose all your downloaded music.
"It has come to our attention that there are a number of inaccurate statements posted by various sources on the Internet regarding the security of Napster and Napster To Go," Bill Pence, Napster's chief technology officer, said in the statement released Wednesday. "As Napster's CTO, I would like to officially state that neither Napster To Go, Napster, nor Windows Media DRM have been hacked."
According to the Engadget post, a user could install Winamp and the Output Stacker plug-in, which they could then use to record the DRM protected files to unprotected digital WAV streams. While this method does in fact work, it doesn't mean that there was any cracking in the process. This is similar to recording a song from the radio to a cassette tape. Napster claims that this hole doesn’t just exist in Napsters music, but in all music from all digital music stores currently.
Source:
Yahoo