Man oh man, there is just nothing-- and we mean nothing-- better than when CEOs get catty in public. Oh, sure, autumn sunsets are nice, as are inner peace, a child's laughter, and that cool shhhlorp sound you get when you shake the cranberry sauce out of the can just right, but honestly, can any of that hold a candle to big business fatcats swapping oblique third-hand potshots? Especially when one of said fatcats is a lil' fella by the name of Steve Jobs; from the Great Jobs-Dell Snipefest of 1997 all the way up to last week's installment in the recurring trash talk exchanges with Disney's Michael Eisner, we've long been a fan of the hot and cold running drama on tap whenever Steve mixes it up with another CEO in the news.

See, on its own, all this latest hoo-haa about Napster's copy protection having been circumvented is really pretty much a Bucket o' Yawns with a side order of yawn slaw. Faithful viewer C. forwarded us a CNET article about the so-called "Napster hack," but it's all old news: as usual, you can run a stream ripper app that intercepts the audio after it's decoded and sent to the sound card, resulting in a new, DRM-free recording of whatever music you just played-- which is a workaround that's older than dirt, so we're not sure why there's so much buzz about it all of a sudden. What does make it interesting is that Uncle Steve is reportedly sticking it to Napster by forwarding details about the technique to bigwigs at the record labels.

No, really! According to an LA Times article forwarded to us by faithful viewer isaac, Steve actually "sent an email Tuesday morning to top record industry executives" containing a link to a web page that describes how to use a stream ripper in conjunction with a Napster subscription to create unlimited DRM-free music files from Napster's full million-song catalog, all for ten bucks a month. "Thought you should know if you haven't heard about this," he says, clearly expecting the execs to blanch in horror and immediately withdraw all support from Napster for allowing such a heinous loophole to remain open-- which is at least a little disingenuous, since Steve can't possibly be unaware that the exact same stream-ripping strategy can be used to make DRM-free copies of iTunes Music Store purchases, too; the difference, of course, is that copying fifty iTunes albums for illegal mass distribution requires buying those fifty albums in the first place, whereas with a ten-dollar Napster subscription and a month's worth of free time, the entire world of mainstream music is more or less your stream-ripping oyster.

But of course, Napster CEO Chris Gorog fought fire with fire-- or, rather, FUD with FUD. He emailed the same execs to inform them that the stream-ripping loophole is not new, and since it duplicates in real time as songs play, it more or less requires that anyone exploiting it spend ridiculous amounts of time sitting around and recording music just like they were taping songs off the radio. He then noted that, on the other hand, it's "trivial" to download software that can strip Apple's FairPlay DRM from iTMS purchases, resulting in completely unlocked songs at 100 percent digital quality, and included a link to where such software is available. Hoooo, and the gloves are off!

Personally, we doubt anything more will come of this FUDfest, but we can hope, can't we? From a pure drama standpoint, the best scenario we can think of would be for the record labels to sue both Jobs and Gorog under the terms of the DMCA, seeing as each emailed a link to software that bypasses the other's DRM. Barring that, we could always work with the old standby: Jobs and Gorog, steel cage match to the death. Either's fine. We're not picky.