The minor war between Apple and Jon Lech Johansen, which had appeared to be over, has escalated further today with a new release of the PyMusique software.
The new software bypasses the security fix that Apple had released in iTunes 4.7 to disable the PyMusique hack, and means that PyMusique users can continue to buy and download music from iTunes which is DRM free.
Apple are no doubt going to be upset by this, and we expect them to respond rapidly. However, continuous product upgrades to a piece of software used by tens of millions of people around the world is not something that can be done lightly, so it is quite possible that Apple are going to be looking at legal action instead.
This certainly wouldn't be the first time that DVD Jon would feel the pressure from a big company, he went through a massive legal battle when he released the controversial DeCSS program.
The new version of PyMusique is currently only available for Linux, and the coders have stated in a web blog that they do not intend to release future versions for Windows. They also say that the purpose of the client is to allow users with operating systems that are not supported by iTunes to be able to access the online store.
They further state that as the DRM is implemented on the client side, and not the server side as they had originally assumed, they are not circumventing the copy protection, they are just not implementing it, as this would take too long in an opensource project.
We expect this is nowhere near the last that we are going to hear of this, and we'll keep you updated with progress as it happens.
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