Hello, On Dec 4, 2010, at 2:44 PM, Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > Hello, > > I was thinking today about adding a long and detailed section explaining > the legal issues that are associated with our project to the wiki. Thus, explaining > the issues with the non-disclosable code and of SonicStage and OpenMG. I have written a draft for this section and I also would like to publish the official answers from Sony USA and Sony Japan. Here is the draft: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Legal Situation --------------- Sony uses a sophisticated DRM (digital rights management) system called OpenMG in SonicStage and their NetMD and HiMD hardware to establish a secured and controlled environment for dealing with digital content. OpenMG ensures that digital content bought over their former online music store "Connect" or through the purchase and subsequent ripping of audio CDs, is protected against unauthorized copying and distribution. Since this content protection must also be maintained when copying the music onto the NetMD/HiMD hardware, both use some kind of encryption to transfer (NetMD) and store (HiMD) the content onto the media. This means, that it is not possible to transfer content to and from the devices without knowing these secret keys, i.e. alpha-numerical codes, from Sony which are used to de- and encrypt the content. We have asked Sony for their kind permission to disclose both these keys for NetMD and HiMD access into public so that we can use the keys in our open source software, but unfortunately, they did not grant us to do so. You can read the official statements from Sony Japan here and Sony USA here. Without these keys, both our NetMD as well as HiMD software has only limited transfer capabilities and the use of additional, external keyfiles which provide these necessary keys are required. We do not provide these. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Any comments? Adrian