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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.
By trying to sue something off the Internet, you only ensure its wider propagation and interest among people who otherwise wouldn't have cared. I'll be sharing a tarball on eMule immediately. Come and sue everybody, Apple.
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.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
No, it's not "your music." You have certain limitations on what you can do with it, like it or not, because you bought it from Apple with those limitations. Don't like it? Don't buy it from them.
I don't like what Apple did (with this lawsuit), but changing the facts to suit your argument doesn't do you any good.
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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"?
Unfortunately, I am not a lawyer, nor do I have the disposable income to pay for one.
However, this looks to me like a(nother) possible test case of the DMCA.
What makes this case attractive is that, to my understanding, PlayFair works WITHIN the accepted norms of society for copyright law (if you don't have a key from iTunes showing you bought the song, it won't convert the audio).
It is a law that is OUTSIDE the accepted norms of society that is causing the problem here.
I googled EFF.org for "playfair" and didn't have any returns of relevance.
Is the EFF involved in this case, or are they even aware of it?
- Neil Wehneman
P.S. I've mentioned this in previous posts, but I'll mention it again here because it's relevant.
Dr. Larry Lessig, who argued "our side" in Eldred v. Ashcroft, has put up his new book Free Culture under a Creative Commons license. Noncommercial redistribution with attribution is freely allowed.
Download the PDF or buy it and support Creative Commons in the process.
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
"play their music"
No, it's not "your music."
It's our music. All of us. The record companies just have it on loan for the duration of their copyright, which, unfortunately for us, keeps getting extended.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I haven't gotten a DMCA takedown notice in the last week or so, so here is a torrent for everyone to enjoy:
t
http://www.isthatdamngood.com/playfair-0.2.torren
Enjoy!
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
I honestly don't know, but I would imagine that Apple is concerned about this not because they want to make sure everything stays locked up for the sake of being locked up, but probably because they don't want the RIAA to yank their licenses and cause all of the iTMS to come crashing down.
Sure, you can make all the standard black helicopter and tinfoil hat jokes, but I really don't see how Apple would care about this, save the ramifications for keeping an amicable relationship with the RIAA pigopolists.
While the DMCA is a horrible piece of legislation, a business would not be doing their shareholders a favor if they didn't use it to protect their business. This is a standard move, everyone saw it coming; and to say that it is a dumb mistake is a bit myopic.
To do nothing would be a bigger mistake for Apple, for entirely different reasons.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
It's not about piracy.
All one has to do to "unprotect" the files is have a player that unlocks them and a high-fidelity digitizer (you know, something like an Audigy card or pod...) to record it with. The loss is not going to be noticeable (i.e. even AAC inserts worse loss than this process does in the first place...) and as long as you use AAC or something that doesn't distort the results appreciably worse, you win.
All this program does is make it easy for a legitimate user to shift it into other formats for their own use. They don't want you to do that. They want you to pay for the CD, the AAC/MP3, and any other format you want to use. In all honesty, they want you to pay for each time you listen to it, but they've not figured out how to do that without drawing too much attention to their damn greed.
If anyone needs a break, it's me- I'm tired of hearing about piracy when it's not about friggin' piracy. Get it in your head about that. They lose FAR more to real IP pirates in Asia where they crank it out by the tons in spite of the protections these jokers keep adding. Why in the hell don't they go shut those SOB's down first? It's because the "public" is an easier target and provides for nice, nifty laws bought with their money that give them all the advantages and the consumers nothing in return.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I'd like to think that Apple is doing this reluctantly, but they've used the threat of litigation against individuals and small organizations too many times in the past to give them the benefit of the doubt. They're like a smaller version of Microsoft--just as evil, but with style and with better PR.
Publicly burn any Apple hardware you own Mac/Ipod/etc. Try to do this en masse, and call your local news station.
I hereby volunteer to be the organizer for a massive event of apple destruction. Please send any Apple hardware (and accessories... don't forget accessories) to me and I will personally supervise its elimination.
This is a really interesting comment. You're drawing a comparison between the people who wrote the GPL and the people who wrote the iTMS contract, which is not something I've seen before.
But it makes sense. Whether you're drawing a contract to protect intellectual property or protect *distribution* of intellectual property, in either case you are deliberately writing a contract that protects some actions and prohibits other actions.
The GPL was developed based on the notion that software is essentially a form of speech, and so should be free. In order to protect this freedom, the GPL dictates that modifications to GPLed software must also be made under the GPL.
The iTMS contract was developed based on the notion that in order for digital music to prosper, there must be limits on how widely a given purchased download can be distributed, so that the music's copyright holders can make a return on their investment. Without the profit motive for the copyright holders, the music won't be put on the iTMS, and Apple won't be making money.
In both cases, restrictions are placed in the license to further the end goal. Attempts to circumvent the license by definition negate the end goal. If the GPL were repeatedly circumvented, the *implementation* of Free Software would be crippled as well. The same is true of the iTMS.
You can't expect that if you change the rules of the game so you can enjoy benefits beyond those you agreed to at the time of purchase, Apple is somehow going to continue to provide the very tools that you hacked. This is quite similar to what would happen if Microsoft took all of the GNU tools, changed them slightly, and released their own Free Windows OS. Everyone on Slashdot would be crying bloody murder, because the value of GPLed software would be denigrated by Microsoft's circumventing of the GPL contract.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
They are not illegal if you live outside the US.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Having read "This Business of Music" Revised and expanded 8th edition By Krasilovski and Shemel, I feel I am qualified to set the record straight on copyright law. As the Law stands, (or stood at the time of the book's publising) all people involved in the creation of a work, be it a book, speech, Musical score, or recording, or Video content such as TV and Film, have equal rights as anyone else invloved in the production. In the case of the band I am with, I have equal rights to the copyright and any royalties, even though I am not a "Musician" (I am the Recording engineer, and I insure that levels are good, and without my contribution the recordings would sound lousy.) If, on the other hand, I was working at a professional studio, all clients (Bands and individual artists) would sign a contrack that establishes the studio as a contractor on a "Work for Hire" basis, and therefore, by default hold no power over the copyright, except anything explicitly spelled out in the contract. A common clause of this nature gives all employees of the studio who work directly for the band, (All the people in the control room) the right to use excerpts of the band's songs as a Demo Reel, or in promoting the studio as a whole. the point of the above was that "Record Labels" make musicians who are "Signed" give up full copyright control over their existing body of work, to the "Label" Lastly, Failure to take action against a known infringer is tantamount, according to the letter of the law, to willfully allowing the work to fall into the public domain. The ultimate point is this: The Judicial system needs to work out who holds the trump card. The Users: In other words "Fair Use is the trump that overrides all else" The DMCA: DMCA makes it illegal to break the DRM, and that is the end of it. Apple: The iTMS EULA is the trump and everything, even fair use must be carried out in accordance with the EULA and its DRM protections
only a small handful of linux nerds had even heard of the thing,
False. DVD-Jon's warez palz had built a Windows-based GUI ripper program long before the Linux community was aware of the software.
The Windows Rip & Pirate community was up and running and distributing thousands of movies over P2P before Linux even got DVD filesystem support, much less a working player.