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Playfair Relocates to India
Lord Grey writes "Imagine my surprise to see playfair 0.5.0 appear on Freshmeat's project list. Remember, the project was pulled after Apple filed a Cease-and-Desist order just a few days ago. playfair's new web site talks a bit about the move, as well as sporting the latest release of the controversial utility."
http://freenet.sf.net
This is one of the reasons to use Freenet. Projects should be moved there instead of just off shore to countries with less draconian (yet) laws.
Freenet won't allow realtime CVS checkins, but it'd be impossible to remove the software from it using legal means.
it's in my head
It's only picking a friend's pocket if I take my unencrypted iTunes and give them to others. Until I do that, it's no less morally wrong than storing my DVDs on my hard drive with DeCSS for my personal use.
In fact, as soon as I confirmed that PlayFair worked, I celebrated by purchasing $11 worth of music at the iTunes Music Store, which I then promptly stripped of all DRM, and I'll be buying more in the future now that I know that all I have to do is back my files up and I'll have this music for the rest of my life, regardless of what happens to Apple.
So I've actually put money in my friend's pocket.
The one place that Apple's DRM failed me was at the office. My office mates and I share our music libraries, and they weren't able to access my protected music. Yet Apple provides music sharing for the other music I've purchased and ripped from CDs. If it is fair use for my ripped music, it should be fair use for my protected music as well. I don't understand the distinction.
The only law I'm breaking is the DMCA, and my karma (the karma that Jobs refers to) will be just fine, because the DMCA is a bad law that I'm convinced will eventually be struck down. To say that I have fair use of my music, but that I can't use the tools to get that fair use is to say that I don't have fair use at all.
I'll continue to purchase music from iTMS. I'll continue to use PlayFair. I'll continue to pay for my music and get the use out of it that I am entitled to.
For years people have been justifying the "illegal" copying of music with arguments such as "the cd is overpriced", "I don't want to pay $17 for one or two songs", etc. Now Apple comes out with a service that addresses many of these issues. They allow you to purchase just the songs you want for a decent cost. They have a flexible DRM policy (without which they wouldn't even be able to offer the service to begin with). Now guys like this come along and still insist on continuing the copying tradition. The excuses now get even thinner. Basically they have no moral leg to stand on.
Worst part is that this just adds fuel to the RIAA fire. They view all sharers as a bunch of crooks, and why not? Basically people are saying "We don't give a crap about copyright laws and your rights to have control over your content, oh, but do something against OUR policies (i.e. GPL) and we'll be first in line crying about "when are you going to release the source!! why are you taking advantage of the hard work of others for your own purposes".
Read Jobs interviews on this. Jobs predicted and expected this. From the way he talks about it I think that he believes that eventually the recording industry will be shown that it is useless to keep pursuing this "protection" of the music through technology. He has made it clear that he doesn't think it is going to succeed.
To be clear, he believes that iTunes, and stores like it. Will primarily succeed because they provide a better experience than P2P for a reasonable cost. The DRM is something that's in there only to appease the RIAA.
Just a quick question...
Has any group of people done any research into whether there is any watermarking or identification contained within the cleaned AAC files... ?
IE, two or more users buy the same song, use PlayFair to strip and clean the AAC, and then compare the resulting AAC files... is there any differences ?
Now Apple comes out with a service that addresses many of these issues.
Apple charges $1 per track for a lossily-compressed file.
That would be $11 for a typical Britney Spears CD, according to a quick look at a Britney Spears discography.
When the RIAA was bitterly complaining about piracy justified by "expense of CD", they put out a cost breakdown -- here's one of the news articles mentioning it.
Let's take a look at this:
Retail Markup is $6.23. Apple says that they're breaking even on iTune audio sales, and only making money on the iPod. Their server hardware and the software backend is a constant cost, and already sunk. Bandwidth is a couple of cents a gig -- let's be generous and say 20 cents/GB. Let's say each AAC is five megs -- that'd be 55 megs. That's about a penny in retail markup to cover those costs that Apple says they're only breaking even on. So far, the price should decrease by $6.22.
Company overhead, distribution and shipping is effectively nil, aside from constant-cost B2B negtiation. The price should decrease by another $3.34, in total $9.56.
Marketing and promotion costs. These should stay the same. Personally, I think that radio (and netradio) stations should be free to play whatever they want, sans royalties, since it's effectively nothing but marketing. But we'll leave the cost, $2.15, in place.
The artist and songwriter recieve $1.99. No decrease.
The signing act and producing record get $1.08. No decrease.
Co-op advertising and discounts to retailers don't really apply in the online world -- a banner ad on Apple's site when buying your music is of negligable bandwidth cost to Apple compared to the bandwidth cost of the audio file -- $.85 decrease.
Pressing album and printing booklet -- doesn't exist in the online world. $.75 decrease.
Profit to label -- $.59, stays the same.
Okay, let's do the math: $.59 + $1.08 + $1.99 + $2.15 + $.01 = 5.82. The price for that Britney Spears CD that used to cost $16 and Apple is selling for $11 should be $5.82 in the online world.
There are numerous other benefits to labels to online music purchases, including the fact that CD audio is lossless and Apple is selling lossy data that is likely to eventually be behind the times in compression algorithm, meaning resales sooner. Cheaper online purchases mean more sales -- and my numbers (unless, of course, the RIAA is lying about their costs and hiding additional profit in per-unit distribution costs or similar) mean that the RIAA makes *more* money in such a scenerio. Returns don't exist -- CDs can be defective, but a bunch of bits is the same bunch of bits when anyone obtains it. Unique per-copy watermarking is easy to do, and watermarking seems to make the RIAA absoutely giggle in delight, so they should like online sales.
Want lossless FLAC quality? It should require about five times the bandwidth -- it should be about four cents more in cost to Apple, or $5.86, for that Britney Spears album.
Now, a couple of assumptions here should probably change, to be realistic. First, the RIAA should probably expect to be making less per-unit, since there's simply less money involved. Second, most retailers aren't going to be happy with just breaking even, and probably are going to want more money (plus, I ignored constant costs, and big business is usually incapable of setting up any computer systems without flushing masses of money down the toilet -- even if data transfer costs should be the dominant expense for a company that makes money by selling data in an automated fashion). That album in lossless FLAC still shouldn't be costing more than $6, which is *half* what Apple charges and provides much better quality.
May we never see th
This is the last place I expected to see such a widespread misunderstanding of the implications of what this program does.
It does the same DRM removal that iTunes does for you already.
In iTunes, you can burn tracks to CD. Then, you can rip them as unprotected tracks. There's a slight quality hit, but it's still equivalent to the original for purposes of copyright law. All PlayFair does for you above iTunes is save you a CD-RW, a few minutes, and the quality hit. You are left with a non-DRM track that is not substantially different from the PlayFair-stripped track. The copyright violation occurs if you distribute the track to those not licensed to have it.
<RANT>
I'm amazed that any slashdotters at all are willing to put up with any sort of DRM, even the relatively friendly Apple version. It's reasonable for the copyright holder to expect me not to distribute it, but restricting my ability in any way to listen to it on all my computers is ludicrous.
My experience in college radio has shown me that RIAA labels are slimy bastards. I'm not willing to give up rights so they can apply an overzealous solution to a "problem" that might not actually exist. Even if all labels ceased to exist tomorrow, we'd all still be alive, folks.
</RANT>
Maybe I'm smoking crack on this one; would someone care to correct me?