Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
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.
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.
"... 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!
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..