The digital rights management on music bought via the Zune Marketplace has been cracked again by a utility called FairUse4WM that first appeared almost a year ago. Back in August, a Doom9 forum user by the name of "viodentia" released the program which was able to strip the copyright protection from both audio and video files.

The hack successfully removed restrictions of where and when the songs could be played, and allowed subscribers of Zune Marketplace to hand over music to other Zune owners using the built-in Wi-Fi. Normally Zune's shared music can only be played three times. Microsoft issued a patch for Windows Media and filed a federal lawsuit against Viodentia for allegedly stealing its source code. However, unable to identify the hacker, Microsoft dropped its suit earlier this year.

Today, the cat-and-mouse game continues, as an user named "Divine Tao" - an anagram of viodentia - on the Doom9 Forum issued an updated version of the utility. FairUse4WM 1.3Fix-2 is able to uncover individual keys from Microsoft's newest Individualized Blackbox components (IBX) used in its DRM. Those keys can be then utilized by the existing FairUse4WM release to strip the copy protection from patched versions of Windows Media.

Users on the Doom 9 Forum claim the update works with the very latest version of Windows Media Player on both XP and Vista along with both Urge and Ruckus. Of course, an update from Microsoft to address this issue is to be expected.