Microsoft sues over source code theft

Found on ZDNet on Tuesday, 26 September 2006
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Microsoft has filed a federal lawsuit against an alleged hacker who broke through its copy protection technology, charging that the mystery developer somehow gained access to its copyrighted source code.

For more than a month, the Redmond, Wash., company has been combating a program released online called FairUse4WM, which successfully stripped anticopying guards from songs downloaded through subscription media services such as Napster or Yahoo Music.

Microsoft has released two successive patches aimed at disabling the tool. The first worked--but the hacker, known only by the pseudonym "Viodentia," quickly found a way around the update, the company alleges. Now the company says this was because the hacker had apparently gained access to copyrighted source code unavailable to previous generations of would-be crackers.

Microsoft is also contacting other Web sites that have posted the FairUse4WM tool, asking them to remove the software, on the grounds that it contains copyrighted company code.

The possibility that Viodentia knows his job and can reverse engineer the DRM process didn't seem to pop up. After all, it's more effective to file a suit and use this pending threat when contacting webmasters. In the end, DRM is still fundamentally flawed: in the worst case, I can connect line-out with line-in and record it anyway, even if the recording has to be done on a different machine. Or you could run the DRM infected player in a virtual machine and grab the audio as soon as it's passed to the clean main system. And all this basically also works for videos.