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PlayFair Pulled Due to DMCA Request
doubleacr writes "MacSlash is reporting that PlayFair has been removed from SourceForge.net. Didn't see that one coming." We posted about PlayFair on Monday. SourceForge.net received a DMCA complaint from Apple on Thursday, claiming PlayFair is in violation of the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA, section 1201(a)(2). As per SourceForge.net policy, the project has been disabled. Should the project managers file a counterclaim, the project could be restored. SourceForge.net is owned by OSDN, the parent company of Slashdot.
In this case, though, that's a moot point, seeing as it's been rehosted. Oh well.
Goo goo g'joob.
Unless you mean the music publishing company. Which of Apple Computer's copyrighted works, does PlayFair remove the protection from?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
...you need to have a Terms of Service to deal with junx like this. We've got one on RubyForge just in case...
The Army reading list
We are allowing for bad precedents to be set. The more we allow to slip out the more we will lose. Are we going to allow shrink-wrap EULAs on CDs when we open them now? "This CD is the only medium you can listen to this music on. You may not encode, rip, record via analog, etc"?
But therein lies the problem of the DMCA... True "Fair Use" becomes criminal.
Strange thing is, this program just quickens what one could already do. I could very easily burn my MP4's to CD, then rip back to MP4 and (if done right) there will be little or no loss. But the bottom line is that PlayFair reaches an ends equal to what one could do with iTunes.
Who doesn't like free music?
Its a great thing this was taken off. Finally we see some good prices, and some good technology to protect the artists. And yeah, there will always be ways around the protection... but leave it for the L33t; dont give it to the masses.
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
That no matter how good/bad the encryption mechanism is, people can't break it.
If I published software that "encrypted" an audio stream by reversing the bits, and someone figured it out or wrote software to get rid of my "encryption" scheme, then I could just start a legal battle against all those who try to publish against me?
This is a wild, unpredictable, capitalistic world, not a pre-school.
I want more money too but that doesn't mean I'm going to get it.
They can't justify that price increase though.
Apple is footing the bill for the backend stuff.
They're not distributing physical goods.
They don't have store fronts.
And if they do increase the price, more piracy will definitely be happening. And they will bitch again.
Get paid to code OSS
I agree 100%, and would like to add - it's not like you can't burn those AAC's to CD. Hell, with all the iTunes songs I keep winning from Pepsi ... for some reason ... I just go to my neighbor and have him burn the songs I want to CD-RW. He gets to keep the songs, I can make mp3s, and I don't even have to waste a CD.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
I fully expect this to be struck down in the same way action against DeCSS was struck down. PlayFair only allows those who have already legally purchased the music to remove the DRM protections - something that was already possible with burning and re-ripping.
Apple is no friend of DRM, but you can bet they are going to do what is necessary to maintain their relationship with the music labels, particularly in light of the labels trying to raise prices and increase restrictions.
The end result of this is moot. Some will say the cat's out of the bag, the genie's out of the bottle, etc, but that's not the case. The cat was never in the bag - this could always be accomplished by a simple burn/rip cycle.
(And before people point out that this doesn't require lossy recompression, seriously consider how many people will leave the file in AAC format, rather than transcode it to the ever-popular MP3.)
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Huh - weird, I thought Sourceforge was related to Free/Open Source software. Odd how relevant that the DMCA is to this goal.
Sounds like free and Open Source world requires a better domicile which is unaffected by parochial considerations. Maybe time that the EU or UN hosted software for and on behalf of the free world.
Its a serious consideration as the US seems to be cyclical based on presidential terms whereas the EU or UN has no such short term considerations to trample rights.
Apple should realise that the only way to protect youself from Open Source is to adopt a strong cryptographically signed service. There is no intrinsic value is any line of code but in code as a service. Sounds like lazy programmer bugs fixed by application of lawyer.
My complaint about AAC -> CD -> OGG/MP3 would be the fact that I have to continually burn coasters. I like my music in MP3 format because then any of my devices can read them (MP3 car CD player, Creative MuVo Nomad, WinAmp, etc.). I burn my music to CD for my car, but it's still in MP3 format so that I can burn a lot of songs on a single CD. Burning standard audios CDs of every song just so that I can get an MP3 of it is ridiculous. I don't drink enough to use that many coasters.
If you mod me down, I shall become less powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Just to play devils advocate, it's not as if people who bought their music from Apple weren't aware of the "limitations" of it's use. If they were, then it's no one's fault but their own.
And FairPlay is the main reason I never signed up for the iTunes store. I have 4 PC's at home alone, and one PC at work - what, I can only play the songs I purchase on 3 of them? Sorry, but that's BS.
Something like PlayFair would actually encourage me (and people like me, of which I know there are a lot on this site alone) to download music from iTunes. I want Apple's quality, I want the convenience, and I want to be legal. Why do Apple and the RIAA insist on making it so hard for me to use their service?
But I agree with your first point. Apple is being very honest wrt what the limitations are, and since they are more flexible and honest than others, they have succeeded with their DRM.
- 4r0g
Of course, when you turn your newly burned CD (from the AAC iTunes tracks) into MP3, the quality will be very diminished, because AAC and MP3 compress in rather different ways. You're essentially compressing it twice; once as AAC, and once as MP3 (the artifacts in each compression will be compounded). PlayFair will remove the need to reencode it, thus improving the quality.
And the counterargument that gets made to comments like yours is that you can burn the tracks to a CD and play it anywhere. You can even re-rip it and listen to the tracks DRM free on 1,000 PCs if you have them.
The counterargument to my counterargument is that by burning & re-ripping you are losing quality, but the counterargument to this counterargument of my counterargument is that if you were enough of an audiophile to care about this, you wouldn't be buying 128K mp4s from iTMS anyway.
They basically broke the law
No, they didn't.
PlayFair actually checks that you have a valid key to use the downloaded music. It won't work on music that you haven't paid for. Thus, it doesn't "circumvent" the DRM, it fully enforces it. It does, however, change what happens to the music for those with legal access to it. Rather than play it, it writes the perfectly-legitimately-accessed music stream to a non-DRM'd AAC file.
Call such a distinction nit-picking, but that very fact means the difference between a DMCA violation and a legal use of one's purchased music.
Now, an end-user actually doing this process may violate their contract with Apple, but that differs drastically from the authors of PlayFair violating the DMCA.
you just gotta get your DMCA violating source code from an off-shore ISP or get sourceforge to relocate.
Exactly what happened - The project relocated to Sarovar, an Indian equivalent to SourceForge. Since India lacks an equivalent to the DMCA, the project should count as legal now.
Interestingly, I'd like any readers of this to really stop and think about what that means - A project designed to protect our fair use (a concept itself (theoretically) recognized in the US but not in all countries) may have broken US law (unless this goes to trial, we can't say they did break the law), simply by moving to another country, magically becomes legal.
So, the DMCA has so much validity that one can circumvent it (how apropos <G>) merely by changing where the "illegal" codebase resides? Definite problem there... Which of course, rather than address in any meaningful way, US lawmakers will try to "fix" by imposing the DMCA on the entire world via treaties (such as those currently under debate in the UN).
Dike, meet fingers. Fingers, meet Dike.
There are several ways to do this.
The simplest is to open the AAC song in iMovie; this converts the song to AIFF and places it in the iMovie Project folder. Another way is to burn the song to a CD-RW which can be recycled. You can also capture the stream when you play it.
Obviously, the iMusic conversion is just a kludge hack that anyone can do. There are programs out there that automate this and dont require the services of iMovie to do it. Its a quicktime feature being used. The fact that you can do it with iMovie just demostrates the point.
this time I don't think the problem it's the RIAA.
iTunes does not make any money
Apple earns money from selling the hardware (iPod e c.)
So they can never let to play their songs withouth their buying anything else from them
I like the GPL, but I don't like the Apple terms. What's wrong with supporting one over the other? They are completely different.
If the DMCA is revoked, then Apple's terms have less teeth, but the GPL remains.
If copyright law is revoked, the GPL becomes unnecessary.
The GPL is aligned with my needs, and based on how little it is violated, it must be aligned with a lot of other people's needs too. The Apple license is not quite as friendly.
I understand the thinking behing posts like this that attempt to create some kind of equivalence between the GPL and other licenses, but you can clearly see they are not the same. Dig deeper and you'll see why it's okay to like one and not the other.
"... Jobs is quoted as saying the his PHds said you can't make a DRM that stops piracy completely.
Which is presumably why Apple employs Phds to 1) devise new forms of DRM
and 2) head the Copy Protection Technology Working Group with Sony and Warner Brothers.
They look as snug as three bugs in a rug.
Or how about you just learn to tolerate an alternative fucking viewpoint, huh, chuckles?
Not everybody wants to bask in your Open Source Society. Some of us are here for the money.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
That's a bit of a leap of logic. If the contract said "and we get your firstborn son", he could have a philosophical objection to that without being against the idea of enforcable contracts. In other words, he objects to the terms of the contract, not the contract itself.
while click throughs are arguable, payment definitely constitutes agreement
Just because he legally agrees doesn't mean he philosophically agrees. Just because he accepts terms he doesn't agree with - terms he can't escape when buying music online - doesn't invalidate his beliefs.
Last post!
" After the copyrights lapse on all the music that Apple offers, then you can break the encryption and fuck with the songs all you want"
This is incorrect. It is always illegal to break encryption to get at content, regardless of the underlying copyright.
Welcome to the wacky world of DMCA.
99 cents? Cheap?
So let's download something like, oh, Manson's _Golden Age of Grotesque_. It costs us $14.95 and downloads in a few minutes (since we're already paying $50 for broadband).
What do we get? 15 non-cohesive, DRM-encrypted, lossy-encoded AAC files that are illegal to play outside of iTunes or an iPod. But, of course, we can burn it.
So let's do just that. It's been awhile since I've bought CD-Rs with jewel cases, but last time I did, they were about 60 cents each. Our total is now $15.55.
We want liner notes, of course, since we want to know who's playing which songs, and so we can read any difficult-to-understand lyrics. And the pictures are pretty cool, too. I figure it'd cost another $3 in raw materials for me to print this stuff out on my inkjet, and an additional $2 to have it laminated so that it's at least waterproof like a real CD. And since Apple doesn't have anything like a PDF file for me to work from, it also costs me a few hours of my time to research, assemble, set, and print this stuff. Being conservative, let's say 5 hours at a modest $12 per hour.
We're now up to $80.55 in just time and materials, and we don't even have a label for the fucking CD yet.
Amazon sells this CD for $14.99, with free shipping. It's even cheaper than that at the large, local music store downtown, and I can walk there from here. Comes with jewel case, glossy liner notes, a screen-printed universally-playable CD with unencrypted, unprotected, uncompressed 16/44.1 stereo audio just like the mastering engineer heard. Takes a but a few minutes to rip to MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC, OGG, MPG, or whatever your particular fancy is. And the folks at Gracenote, freedb, or MusicBrainz will gladly fill in the id3 tags for you, negating any severe production time from the format conversion.
Are you sure iTMS is cheaper?
Kid-proof tablet..
It is located in Trivandrum, India
Sounds like a nice place. Gotta visit sometime. Looks like India put a spanner in the works of the good old DMCA.
Apple invoked the DMCA? That was the last thing people thought would happen, right? I mean, Apple are our heroes - right?
I like to bitch about what is wrong with the government here also, but I'm not so fed up that I think there is another country out there that is better overall than America.
So why are you still here? Honestly?
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.