james holden

It seems a little strange to be writing about a piece of Windows software here, because I’ve not used Windows for about 5 years. It turns out that, while I’ve been happily ripping my CDs and encoding them with Ogg Vorbis, the unfortunate souls still using the other OS are having to put up with some sort of ropey media player that tries to stop you from transferring your media files to other computers you own, to your portable music player and so on.

All is not lost for those people though, because some enterprising chap has produced a utility that defeats this control mechanism. Because it seems that Microsoft deem possession of the utility to be copyright infringement (which is obviously isn’t), many sites are unable or unwilling to host the program. I don’t agree with Microsoft’s stance against fair use, so I’m hosting a copy here for anyone who wants it. You can get it on the FairUse4WM download page. The copyright of this file belongs to the author of the utility, not Microsoft. If the author wishes that I remove the file, then I’ll gladly do so.