Digital Home Thoughts: How to Rip Off Napster-to-Go (And Janus)

We reported on Napster's excellent Napster-to-go service a couple of weeks ago. It brought together the music from Napster and combined it with Microsoft's Janus service to give you the ability to download an unlimited amount of music (albeit limited to a few select players for now) for a low fee of $15 per month. The only "catch" is the you are only downloading the music to your device, and can't misuse it or profit from it, for example, burn it to CD and sell it. The service as well as the concept rocks and I like the concept behind Janus a lot, just waiting for a service to support my iRiver.

Anyways, someone has discovered a loophole in this service and instructions have already been released on how you can exploit the service to get around the above mentioned catch. I'm not going to advise you to do anything, but apparently if you install Winamp along with the Output Stacker plug-in you can convert those protected WMA files to WAV files and then burn them to CD. So it looks like MS never bothered properly DRMing the stuff. If someone cracks iTunes, it only gives them access to music they bought. So is Janus destined to fail even before it has taken off?