Napster's New Deal
Once a song goes through the wash, it is important to note, it will always stay ”clean” — it never turns back into a standard MP3. Instead it will remain in a special, scrambled format which can be played only by the recipient, who would be in sole possession of the decoding key.
Here’s Napster’s new plan for staying around… I simply cannot wait for them to do this, so I can start the stopwatch to see how long it takes for a hacker to crack it. My guess would be a couple hours. They’re talking about using the Napster protocol to scramble files in different ways when you download a file. The file gets scrambled depending on what you’ve paid for: if you paid for the ability to burn CDs with the MP3s, the file you get is encrypted with the ability to do that. You have a ‘key’ that decrypts songs for your own use. If you don’t want to pay, you get the ability to listen to songs for a few hours or days… Which is what I’m assuming people will hack: the encryption mechanism that converts MP3s into scrambled Napster files. They’ll make it so you can convert them back into regular old-fashioned MP3s.