Can this be done, and if so, how? It seems that there's an increasing trend for movies/audios that are download legally off websites to be protected in some way by DRM, i.e. they connect to the internet and try to acquire a license. The way I see it, this will never take off, purely because people will object to being told what to do with movies and songs when they've already paid for them. But in the meantime, does anybody know of a way of either removing the DRM protection from a file, or encoding the content of that file to a new file, whilst leaving the DRM part behind?

Most music downloaded from pay-for sites (like iTunes) are DRM protected.

The music companies want to make sure that the file is only played or copied a certain ammount of times (according to their terms and conditions).

Currently there are a few different types of music files that are protected by a type of DRM. iTunes protection has been broken, but as for any other's I really don't know.

There is still a bit of a legal argument going around as to if you are allowed to strip the DRM encoding out of a media file that you have paid for, so for that point I won't give you any hints about how to get around any protection (sorry!).

Thing is, the files in question will only play if they can re-acquire the license, which means connecting to the internet - so, effectively, I would be able to play DRM files on my desktop PC but not my laptop. Which is a bummer.

That sounds like Microsoft's new WMA file format.
Part of the licence for the music is that it is either time restrictive or only locked to one computer, which is why it accesses the licence (held on the music sites server) to see if you are allowed to play it.

See if you can play it in anything other than Media Player (such as Winamp) that might "Ignore" the licence bit and play it anyway, but don't hold your breath.

there is a plugin for winamp called
Winamp WMA Plugin DRM Ripping (5.03a)
it allows you to convert these DRM-protected
WMA files to any other (unprotected) format if you
have license for the current.
Use the Diskwriter plugin for it.

Search on google and you will find it

Well, WinAmp only seems able to rip from CD and not hard drive. Not only that, when I looked at configuring the Disk Writer plug-in, it seems to work only with audio CDs and not data files. Unless I'm missing something...

There is an disc writing plugin that comes as standard with Winamp, but there is a seperate WMA Plugin for DRM Ripping, but you'll have to search for it on the net.

Note that Winamp cannot play certain DRM protected WMA content even with the official WMA plugin that coems with Winamp.

Another alternative is record the music as it plays. Setup a recording application such as Goldwave and prepare a blank 44kHz, 16-bit stereo track. Bring up the soundcard's recording audio mixer, mute all devices except 'wave' and max the 'wave' level.

Finally press record in Goldwave (or other recording tool) and press play in Windows Media player. Allow the track to play through, then press stop in Goldwave, cut-out the excess silence at the start & end of the track and save your track. Do a test play to be sure it recorded fine

Even if the soundcard does happen to add a slight hiss to the recorded track, this is nothing compared to the audible artefacts present in WMA.