Microsoft has filed a federal lawsuit against an alleged hacker who broke through its copy protection technology, charging that the mystery developer somehow gained access to its copyrighted source code. For more than a month, Redmond has been combating a program released online called FairUse4WM, which successfully stripped anti-copying guards from songs downloaded through subscription media services such as Napster or Yahoo! Music.
Microsoft has released two successive patches aimed at disabling the tool. The first worked - but the hacker, known only by the pseudonym "Viodentia", quickly found a way around the update, the company alleges. Now it says this was because the hacker had apparently gained access to copyrighted source code unavailable to previous generations of would-be crackers.