There goes the neighborhood-- or so you might think. From your perspective, it probably seems like everything was just fine with the iTunes Music Store during its first six months of operation... you know, back when it was a Mac thing. Tons of Mac users happily purchased millions of songs at a fair market price and never once considered subverting Apple's "FairPlay" digital rights management system for purposes of illicit purposes. Oh, sure, there was that little flap about streaming songs across the Internet, and there were plenty of us burning purchased tracks to disc and re-encoding them as unprotected MP3s, but that was so we could (for example) play the songs on our TiVos, and not so we could pirate them via KaZaA-- and actually cracking FairPlay itself was the furthest thing from our innocent little minds. The sun always shone, the birds always sang, and life had a bouncy little idyllic soundtrack sort of like something from "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet."

And then the Windows users moved in. (Da da da dummmmmmm!)

You all probably remember the brouhaha that ensued when somebody on the Wintel side of the fence released a little something called MyTunes, which made it simple for Windows users to capture other people's streamed iTunes songs to disk; technically it really wasn't that big a deal, since anyone looking to swipe a song with MyTunes would need shared access to someone else's library and be using one of three "authorized" computers to play (and thus capture) purchased iTMS music anyway-- but it certainly seemed like a harbinger of things to come.

Well, evidently it was, since The Register now reports that no less a celebrity geek than Jon Lech "DVD Jon" Johansen, the guy who cracked the CSS encryption used to copy-protect most commercial DVDs (and has subsequently spent most of his waking hours beating back endless waves of Hollywood lawyers trying to collect the bounty on his spleen) has turned his attention to iTunes for Windows. Reportedly he has written a short program called "QuickTime for Windows AAC memory dumper" ("Catchy name, Jon, but what does it do?") that "dumps the output of a QuickTime stream to a file." Sounds innocuous, right? Except that the QuickTime streams it can grab include protected iTMS songs-- and unlike MyTunes, DVD Jon's program isn't just recording whatever sound comes across the sound card; according to MacRumors, it's actually intercepting and writing the raw AAC data-- sans encryption. In other words, it can strip the copy protection right out of iTMS song files without the loss of quality associated with "stream rippers."

The software's in an early state, yet, so the raw AAC data lacks header info and is therefore unplayable in any actual software so far, but the writing's on the wall... and who knows how the music industry will react? It sure would be unpleasant if this sort of activity led to the labels taking their ball and going home, forcing the iTMS to close up shop. But like we said before, you may well think that this is all happening because Apple let Windows users into the party-- which, to a certain extent, is true, but just to keep the prejudice from getting completely out of hand, it's good to keep in mind that DVD Jon cracked CSS so that Linux users could (legally) watch DVDs, not so that Windows users could pirate movies. Motive aside, though, things might get a little ugly from here on out, and Apple might get caught in the middle. D'oh! Here's hoping Steve keeps his Reality Distortion Field set on "frappé," or maybe even "liquefy"...