Digital Media Thoughts came across an interesting program named Sound Taxi that can reportedly convert your DRM infested music tracks to high quality restriction free Mp3s. According to the company’s website “technically Sound Taxi does not circumvent Microsoft’s or Apple’s iTunes DRM protection. Microsoft’s DRM protection system is unprotecting the protected DRM audio files.”
From their description it sounds like the software might be making analog copies of digital songs. I’m not sure the exact restrictions of the DMCA, but if this is in fact a legal loophole, this could be a real problem the music industry. On one level, I’ve never felt bad about pirating songs from the studios because I’ve only really downloaded content when they’ve refused to make it available to consumers online. Call it a form of social protest if you will, but with the advent of paid downloads, it’s been at least 3 or 4 years since I’ve actually used a P2P network.
While Sound Taxi may or may not infringe upon the legal rights of the studios, I certainly think that there might be some ethical issues with the software they are providing. Allowing people to convert iTunes into Mp3′s is one thing because consumers have paid for each song, but allowing (legal or not) consumers to bypass the “subscription” copy protections that Yahoo! and Napster doesn’t exactly sit square with me. If you are paying $5 per month to download an unlimited number of songs and then using SoundTaxi to turn those into Mp3′s, it’s hard for me to see how this wouldn’t be piracy. At the very least, it has to be a violation of Napster’s TOS.
I think it’s ridiculous that Microsoft is having to pay studios for consumers to transfer their music off of iTunes and in someways the studios have brought this on themselves by not supporting an open standard for DRM that allows interoperability regardless of where you buy your music from, but in the case of Sound Taxi, I think that they may have taken this too far. Finding a work around to Apple’s refusal to share FairPlay is one thing, but using legal loopholes to circumvent subscription based music programs runs the risk of undermining the free and subscriber based mp3 models that a lot of consumers enjoy.