A few years ago, I used PureTracks.com for my purchased music, before I owned an iPod. Music on that service was relatively expensive, at $1.29 - $1.49 per track. I paid $14.99 for a whole album on there once.

Once I got an iPod, I turned to iTunes for my purchased music.

So I have a bucket full of PureTracks DRM music on my system that I have not listened to in a long time. I just opened up Windows Media Player to check, and I have not played music using Windows Media Player since March 2005!

Now, for the first time, someone has cracked the Windows Media Player license scheme. It can, as far as I can tell, extract the decryption key from Windows Media Player itself. Once it has that, it can decrypt the music permanently.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=114916

I know this is illegal under the DMCA (copyright circumvention), but I am not American so it does not apply to me. Tonight I decrypted dozens of WMA files, and imported it into iTunes. I can now listen to these songs again, for the first time in 1.5 years.

I usually don't do this. Heck, I still own 100's of MB of songs purchased and locked up under iTunes DRM. But to have one media player, and to listen to songs on my one portable device of choice (iPod) - that has to be my right as a consumer. I cannot fathom a law or a judge that would say that even though I purchased this music, I somehow can't play it on my computer or my music player. It's not stealing - it's Fair Use!

And in an ironic twist: The first time I tried running the program against my WMA files, it failed. So I ran Windows Media Player myself, and tried to play the music, and Windows Media Player said I had to download a mandatory update in order to continue. Once I had done that, FairUse4WM worked! Thank goodness for security updates!