Real DRM

The NY Times reports that RealNetworks Plans to Sell Songs to Be Played on iPods

Tomorrow, without Apple's authorization, RealNetworks will start to give away software that will allow people to buy and download songs from its online music store and then play them on Apple's popular iPod portable devices in addition to those that use the Windows Media Player format and RealNetwork's Helix format.

I suspect that what the Real software does is merely strips the downloaded file of its proprietary DRM and loads it onto the music player as an unprotected MP3 or AAC file. The music player will be able to read it normally.

The Times article claims, "This will be the first time any company other than Apple has sold songs for the iPod." In fact, eMusic has been selling legitimate downloads of songs which can play on the iPod for longer than Apple.

Why would an iPod user who is locked in to using iTunes to sync her collection to the iPod even bother with Real?

UPDATE: News.com has more details: Real Networks breaks Apple's hold on iPod

Harmony also will automatically change songs into an iPod-compatible format. But because Apple has not licensed its FairPlay copy-protection software to anyone, RealNetworks executives said its engineers had to re-create their own version in their labs in order to make the device play them back.

Although the company said this action wasn't technically "reverse engineering," the software could trigger intense legal scrutiny.

So Real has created a clone of FairPlay by a process like reverse-engineering, in order to allow its DRM'ed songs to play on the iPod.

Does this constitute anti-circumvention under the DMCA? As Ernest Miller discusses in What Real's Hacking of FairPlay Doesn't Do, the Real software does not affect any songs already in the FairPlay DRM format. In fact, it only converts from one use-restrictive format into another.