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Apple Hunts Playfair in India
An anonymous reader writes "A news posting at Sarovar.org says that they have to take down the 'PlayFair' program upon receiving a notice from Apple's attorneys. They are awaiting their attorneys' response. This is bad news for all those who appreciated this cool program. Let's hope that 'PlayFair' might appear in some other country now."
...since it was getting downloaded around 5000 times a day before it got pulled. I'm sure the other project admins at Sarovar aren't sad to see it go; now they have a much more responsive server :-)
And again, if you put up a public (foo)Forge, make sure you have a Terms of Service document to cover this sort of thing.
The Army reading list
I could care less about this program.
Anyone who's concerned about what little DRM Apple has put in the ITMS files can just burn it to an audio cd (on a rewritable disc) and then rip it to MP3. It's what my girlfriend and I do.
(besides, I could never get the win32 version of this program to do anything other than spit out the help file)
How many computers do you have? You can authorize the files to be played on up to three computers, and if you have more than that, just set up a iTunes server. I have one box that has iTunes which I buy the music from. Then I just leave iTunes running all the time and I can then access the music from any computer in my house.
(you can also just burn the song to CD and rip it back as mp3...)
http://btiteam.bttracker.co.uk/download.php?id=370 &name=playfair-0.2.tar.gz.torrent
Karma: Bizzare (mostly affected by varying internal caffeine levels.)
http://students.washington.edu/joshuadf/decss/
Use responsibly.
You know that RIAA notice on movies? The one that says 'protected by United States copyright law and international treaties'? And then they show the INTERPOL logo? Of which India is a member?
Probably relates to this, too...
~ Aero
Both the Copyright Act 1957 and the Information Technology Act, 2000 are Indian laws. I doubt that the Copyright Act would have any DMCA like provisions that could apply on this case. Not so sure about the Information Technology Act. It was hailed as a great piece of forward looking legislation when it was introduced. Any Indian lawyers care to comment?
more about me
Oh yes they did.
Is not an "intellectual appeal", it's a threat to make them spend the rest of their lives in court and/or be bankrupted. It's one step removed from a horse's head in the bed.> Information Technology Act, 2000 and the Copyright Act, 1957 ... Is that Indian law
>
Both are Indian laws. FWIW, Indian law is largely based upon English common law. It's quite common for Indian courts to cite English and US Court judgement in their judgements. (India's tradition of of law interpretation is one reason why India has been considered a "safer" IP outsourcing destination than, say, China).
One thing that Indian courts don't have (very apparent in criminal trials) is a jury. (It had one to begin with, it was abandoned after it was found prone to abuse) The judge alone hears arguments and interprets the law.
You're fooling yourself if you think that you must distribute binaries of a copy-protection circumvention application. The 2600 guys were successfully prevented from hyperlinking to sites with the source code. That's right. There is precedent for /. to be sued for leaving your comment in this discussion, based on the DMCA.
In any case, THIS IS EXEMPT! Read the DMCA under 6 exemptions:
2. Reverse engineering (section 1201(f)). This exception permits circumvention, and the development of technological means for such circumvention, by a person who has lawfully obtained a right to use a copy of a computer program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing elements of the program necessary to achieve interoperability with other programs, to the extent that such acts are permitted under copyright law.
PlayFair is needed to allow us to use the protected work in hardware that does not support the FairPlay encryption scheme. While I might not bet my life on that, it at least is a good place to start in challenging this (as well as in the case for DVD's).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
*sigh*
Someone else that doesn't understand the difference between a EULA and the GPL.
The GPL has zero clauses about how you use a product. Once you've downloaded a GPL'd program, you can do anything you like with it - run it how you like, or print it out and stick it to your cat, even use it to run your tinpot dictatorship torture chambers.
Music downloaded from itunes has an implicit licence (or even an explicit licence - I can't find out, as they won't let us heathen british in yet), enforced by DRM, which restricts how you use the music. You can't put it on anything but an ipod, you can't sell it to anyone else, you can't easily transcode so you can listen to in other than your "Apple Approved" equipment (yes, yes, I know about the cd-burning. My only machine with a burner runs linux.)
NONE of these are protections entitled by law. EULA's are unenforceable fake contracts. The ONLY thing stopping you is the DMCA, which prevents you circumventing protections, even when it otherwise LEGAL to do so.
Even that is debatable, as the DMCA does not prevent reverse engineering for interoperability, so it could be argued that, even in the US, you are entitled to media shift your legally purchased music to use on an alternate player.
So the GPL allows you to do whatever you want with the product, Apple'd DRM does not. One is as open as you can be, one is very restrictive (if you don't own 100% apple equipment)
When you get a GPL program, you can copy it as much as you like, and distribute as much as you like, even distributing modified versions. Except that's illegal under copyright law, so you need permission to do so. The GPL grants you that permission, as long as you distribute the source.
When you get an Apple DRM file, you can make a handful of copies for personal use. You can't give it to anyone else at all, even to legally sell your only copy!
So even with making copies, the one thing copyright law prevents, the GPL is very open, while the Apple DRM is very restrictive.
Playfair has nothing to do with copyright (the right to publish copies, natch). Playfair allows you to remove the DRM-enforced USE restrictions.
It's as defendable as a record button on a video player, it's as defendable as a lockpick, it's as defendable as a crowbar - all of which can be used for legal, or illegal things.
Apple have the right to sell their products with use-restricting DRM; we have the right to remove it.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
The laws cited are Indian. (If it were US, they'd be talking DMCA.)