While reading an article in the Economist about France's iTunes law, I started thinking about the current state of affairs for 'liberating' DRM'd music (DMCA aside for the moment) - burn to a CD and then rip it back off with your choice of compression. The goal of France's law (although most likely not the outcome) is to make DRM music more like a CD - it'll work on anyone's player, regardless of manufacture.
This made me think about CD's and virtual CD's (such as mounted
Nero Drive Images).
My thought was this: with sufficiently clever programming, would it be possible to present a virtual CD-R to the a DRM-honoring application - thereby allowing it to 'burn' to the virtual device. Then, at the other end (and most usefully, simultaneously) a software compressor would take the bits back off. This would speed things up (creating in essence REALLY fast CD-R devices for presentation to the burning software), and, in theory allow for quick scrubbing of DRM.
Mind you this is a theoretical question, I do not use DRM music of any kind, but am interested if there's any specific technical reasons which would prevent this sort of bit streaming and re-compressing.
I'm interested in anyone's thoughts. If this post is deemed to piratical for the board administrator's tastes, I completely understand if it is removed. I'm simply curious about the subject.
-Zeke