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."

Comments

Re:Let's hope indeed

[whelck]

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...)

BitTorrent mirror for PlayFair

[hbmartin]

http://btiteam.bttracker.co.uk/download.php?id=370 &name=playfair-0.2.tar.gz.torrent

Re:A few thoughts

[JoshuaDFranklin]

Here is my mirror of the source code. There are no binaries, no DMCA violations:

http://students.washington.edu/joshuadf/decss/

Use responsibly.

Re:Time for the /. IANAL to begin

[cygnusx]

> 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.

Re:A few thoughts

[Fallen Kell]

I don't know about that. Once you cross the line as to saying that code is not speach then where is the actuall line? That was the whole point of the DeCSS Gallery, to prove that there is no line between source code and speach.

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).