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| 7:16pm EDT, Thu Sep 2 |
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App Store DRM Cracked; No One Really Cares
By:
The Online Reporter
Publish Date: February 06, 2009
Complete articles are posted three weeks after they have been sent to subscribers. To request a copy of the current edition, e-mail paperboy@riderresearch.com .
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This past weekend, the site Funky Space Monkey released its
Crackulous 0.9, which removes the DRM from Apple’s App Store software
and allows users to distribute pirated programs outside of App Store
channels, costs and revenue. The software was developed by
Hackulo.us, a donation-based forum that exists to steal and crack
software.
There is a tinge of sweet irony in all of this for Apple, though, as
the pirate software — developed by the iPhone pirate “Salad Fork” —
has been pirated from its creator twice now and is being sold by
other individuals.
The software has been “legitimately” downloaded from Fork about
20,000 times.
What It Does
Crackulous is basically a program that can be applied to legitimate
downloads from the iTunes App Store and then creates a version of
those previously legitimate apps that can be run on jailbroken
iPhones. Users then upload them throughout the Net to share. The
creators have all suggested various sites to upload cracked apps to.
Numbers Don’t Lie or Care
At first glance those 20,000 downloads might seem a bit troubling, as
that would be a fair amount of consumers openly pirating.
Currently, there have been around 500 million App Store downloads
across 10 million iPhones. In the grand scheme of things, that 20,000
isn’t a large number of users and it doesn’t represent enough
monetary loss for anyone to direct undue attention or ire toward — no
one wants to be seen as another RIAA.
The reason that the hacks and cracks haven’t caught on is also much
more compelling than in the case of the blatant piracy associated
with the music industry: Apple presented an amazing product and
almost right off the bat paired it with an amazing service that is
easy to use and navigate. Apple was able to take the lessons the
music and film industries have learned and apply it to its system
from the word go.
All DRM aside, iPhone developers are not only embracing the free, ad-
supported model but they’re also producing content that consumers
view as worth paying for.
Apple has a clear advantage over the music and film industries, so a
direct comparison is a little unfair, but the lesson from this seems
to be that users are willing to go to legitimate sources for content
if those are the best sources — or at least the only easy-to-use
sources. |
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