Music converter software
The News Sentinel has a story today about a new piece of software called Hot Recorder from United Virtualities. Hot Recorder allows you to take the songs you get from Yahoo and ITunes and use them with any MP3 player. It pulls the copy protection off of them by converting them to generic MP3’s as they play. Based on the test, it is not 100% but it seems to work most of the time on most boxes. There is a copy right issue here, and no one knows if it will follow the Sony model - the maker of the product is not responsible for the use of the product - or the Grokster model - the maker of a product which is made to do illegal activities is responsible for it’s use. Time will tell.
Apple and Yahoo both have service terms that forbid circumvention of copy-protection technology.
I’ll leave it to lawyers to sort out whether that clause applies here and whether HotRecorder has any legitimate uses. (Apple and Yahoo declined comment.)
Surely, United Virtualities is no newcomer to controversy: It’s the developer of a technique designed to restore the data profiles that many privacy-conscious users try to delete from their computers. It’s also the company behind some of those floating ads that dance across Web pages, sometimes blocking what you’re trying to read.
HotRecorder indeed works - some of the time - in freeing your tunes from copy protection.
Just use it at your own risk.
Full Knoxville News Sentinel story here
