A recent CNN article the entitled "Norwegian hacker cracks iTunes code" tells the the story of Jon Johansen's latest effort, QTFairUse:

The new program circumvents iTunes' anti-copying program, MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding, by legally opening and playing a protected music file in QuickTime, but then, essentially, draining the unprotected music data into a new and parallel file.

While the headline is incorrect (no encryption or code was broken), the sentence above is an accurate description. As long as one has access to the internals of the Operating System (OS), one will have access to raw "decoded" sound. GNU/Linux is open, and I've used this fact to save and encode real audio files for quite some time now (saverm.py). However, there are dangers; I use the vsound tool which the original author discontinued:

October 27th, 2002

Although I have maintained vsound for nearly three years, I can no longer do so, nor can I continue to make it available from this web site.

I live in Australia which has a law (Digital Agenda Bill 2000) which is similar to the DCMA in the US in that it makes the distribution of a devices for circumventing copyright protection illegal. I have neither the time, money or inclination to make myself a possible target for such legal action by companies with endless legal and financial resources.

Johansen is an interesting character in this latest drama because he was also prosecuted for writing DeCSS, the tool I use to watch DVDs under Linux. In March 2003 he was acquitted in Norway, "The court finds that someone who buys a DVD film that has been legally produced has legal access to the film. Something else would apply if the film had been an illegal pirate copy."

So now, Johansen is taking a stand for reasonable use once again. However, the Norwegian legal system has shown some sanity, and they don't have a DMCA. He's probably safe. In the U.S. the publisher 2600 was successfully sued for merely linking to a site which had the DeCSS software. Also, things like QTFairUse and vsound are used by some in the industry to argue that the law should mandate DRM (Digital Rights Management) in all software and operating systems, rendering open systems such as GNU/Linux illegal.