Slashdot Mirror
Update on Playfair
An anonymous reader writes "A few weeks back, Slashdot reported that Apple had sent a cease and desist letter to Sarovar.org, the Indian site hosting the Playfair project. This is the first incident in India where a corporation has used legal means to shut down a Free Software project. Some of the prominent members of the Open Source/Free Software community in India have issued an update on this situation. There is also an interesting post in the FSF-India mailing lists."
Some nice discussion here.
I tried to access it at 10:13 EDT, and the entire site is unreachable. Perhaps my ISP is blocking it at some level or Apple got to them already.
Not that they give a crap about free-speach, its more that they are very adept at looking the other way... Although that kind of environment is wonderful soil for all sorts of illicit activity, it also gives you a great climate for anything that might normally get snuffed out in lawyer happy environments...
meh
(cut out '-' used to serve as underlines for section headers to get past /.'s "lameness filter" and made all paragraphs into one line to get past /.'s "lines contain fewer than 38 characters". Enjoy)
BACKGROUND
Sarovar (http://www.sarovar.org/) was setup about a year back as a facility for free software hackers. It's running the GForge software under Debian GNU/Linux. Think of it as a Savannah in India (http://savannah.gnu.org/ and http://savannah.nongnu.org/ are servers providing facilities for distributed development of free software projects). The Sarovar server is physically located in Trivandrum, India. It is sponsored by Trivandrum based company River Valley Technologies and maintained by Linuxense, another Trivandrum-based company. Rajkumar S, who works at Linuxense. is one of the maintainers of Sarovar. These 2 companies (River Valley and Linuxense) maintain Sarovar as a service for the free software community in India and abroad. Sarovar now hosts 130 projects and has more than 930 registered users from across the world.
PlayFair is a tool to enable fair use for music purchased from Apple's iTunes music service. It lets people play music in non-Apple authorized hardware like a GNU/Linux PC, provided an authorized key is available. It does that by stripping the Digital Rights Management (DRM) facility from a song, provided the key to playing the song is available. PlayFair is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL -- http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL).
The author of PlayFair prefers to remain anonymous.
HISTORY
PlayFair was originally hosted at Sourceforge.net, a US-based project similar to Savannah and Sarovar. Apple invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against PlayFair and Sourceforge took down the project. Since DMCA has an anti circumvision provision, PlayFair *may* be illegal in the USA.
Once Sourceforge shut down the project, PlayFair's author contacted Sarovar for hosting, and since India do not have a DMCA like law, Rajkumar S approved the project as it is legal in India. The project was available at Sarovar for about a week and had about 30,000 downloads.
Last Friday (2004-04-16) Apple sent a Cease and Desist (C&D) letter to the sponsors, maintainers and ISP of Sarovar.org invoking the IT Act 2002 and Indian Copyright act, and instructed them to take down PlayFair within 24 hours. The full letter from apple is available at
http://sarovar.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=474
Since the letter was addressed to the ISP and sponsors, and as they had some limitations on fighting the case, Sarovar decided to take down PlayFair, even though they believed that it was legal.
Some of the hackers who maintain Sarovar.org had pretty strong feelings about this case, but were helpless against the legal force from Apple.
As we think about the implications of such a C&D letter from a corporation against a free software project, it becomes apparent that the issue at hand is not just related to PlayFair or Sarovar or River Valley. What is really happening is a corporation is using legal means to shut down a free software project in India for the first time and the small project is left defenseless even though they believe that they are right.
This letter from Apple will have a profound impact on freedom for Indians and people all over the world. If we do not fight back, we will be on our way on a slippery slope. If we win it will be a momentous victory with impact all over the world.
PLAYFAIR IS NOT MUSIC THEFT
PlayFair does not give the user any special facilities that Apple itself has not given the user:
1. PlayFair requires a valid key from Apple to convert the format of music downloaded from iTunes. PlayFair cannot convert downloaded songs' formats without authorized keys.
2. PlayFair is not a music distribution program. All PlayFair does is convert songs from one, restricted format to another, le
You might find this plugin quite helpful. This thread has more info.
Playfair
It's not really a question about whether it's ethical or not. If you have music from the ITMS, you bought it from Apple, and YOU AGREED TO THESE TERMS OF SERVICE. If you make a piece of software to "circumvent or modify any security technology or software that is part of the Service" than you are breaking your contract with Apple, and thusly breaking the law. It's pretty simple.
And portraying a cracker-program as an "open-source effort" is a bit like calling the NRA a grass-roots civil rights campaign.
They're at least as grass roots as the ACLU.
Anyway, you say that as if the 2nd Amendment portion of the Bill of Rights wasn't a civil right.
Join the ACLU & EFF to support Amendments 1 and 3-9. Join the NRA and GOA to support Amendment 2. Amendment 10 gets ignored selectively by everyone, unfortunately.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
Sealand pretty much gives up customer lists on request specifically because they don't want their tenuous claim of independence to be tested. So you're not anonymous, and if your actions are illegal in the country where you are, not your server, you're sunk.
Not at all. That isn't my logic.
My logic is: If you signed/agreed to a contract with the stipulation you would *only* run Windows, then yes, installing Linux violates your contract. In some situations I can see how doing so might even violate the warranty, much like installing third party 'unauthorized' components can do the same thing. Not saying it's right, but saying that's my logic.
I also don't think you understand my logic if you think system restore tools should be illegal. It would only be illegal, according to my logic, if you sign a contract/agreement that you would only use the Windows system restore.
In this case users of Apple's iTunes signed an agreement; signed it with their credit card number, actually, when they first opened their accounts on iTunes! Terms of Sale and Terms of Service.
Specific relevant portions:
Terms of sale:
You agree that you will not attempt to, or encourage or assist any other person to, circumvent or modify any software required for use of the Service or any of the Usage Rules.
Terms of service:
b. Security. You understand that the Service, and products purchased through the Service, such as sound recordings and related artwork ("Products"), include a security framework using technology that protects digital information and limits your usage of Products to certain usage rules established by Apple and its licensors ("Usage Rules"). You agree to comply with such Usage Rules, as further outlined below, and you agree not to violate or attempt to violate any security components. You agree not to attempt to, or assist another person to, circumvent, reverse-engineer, decompile, disassemble, or otherwise tamper with any of the security components related to such Usage Rules for any reason whatsoever. Usage Rules may be controlled and monitored by Apple for compliance purposes, and Apple reserves the right to enforce the Usage Rules with or without notice to you. You will not access the Service by any means other than through software that is provided by Apple for accessing the Service. You shall not access or attempt to access an Account that you are not authorized to access. You agree not to modify the software in any manner or form, or to use modified versions of the software, for any purposes including obtaining unauthorized access to the Service. Violations of system or network security may result in civil or criminal liability.
and
c. You agree that your purchase of Products constitutes your acceptance of and agreement to use such Products solely in accordance with the Usage Rules, and that any other use of the Products may constitute a copyright infringement. The security technology is an inseparable part of the Products. The Usage Rules shall govern your rights with respect to the Products, in addition to any other terms or rules that may have been established between you and another party. Apple reserves the right to modify the Usage Rules at any time.
I'm not saying it's right, only that it is clearly outlined when you gave then your buck.
GPL Deconstructed
A "cracker-program"? Hardly. Just a snippet from the sarovar response:
So read it and think again.I'm swimming in bandwidth.. download it if you haven't already. =)
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This posting is irrelevant: the poster quoted some useful parts of the copyright act, but these are not useful in in the case of playfair. The sections quoted apply to computer programs, _not_ to other forms of media. Songs with RMI are not computer programs. I don't think there's any way to argue around this.
why don't people use software-emulated CDROMs so that you don't have to waste a CD?
No, no. The 'King' is selling out on their previously cool privacy and terms of use policies. SeaLand is no longer a safe haven. See past Slashdot stories.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
playfair might not be hosted in Norway, but DeDRMS is:
D RMS.cs
http://nanocrew.net/software/DeDRMS/DeDRMS-0.1/De
Written by DVD-Jon, who also wrote the decryption code that playfair uses.
AAC files from the ITMS are 48 kHz. You're resampling at 44.1 kHz when you burn to CD, thus losing some fidelity, definitely not the most ideal solution, and definitely not without some quality loss.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
It was posted on Freenet several days ago (almost immediately after it is pulled from Sourceforge) - SSK@5Zy5e6nlgMfN3Bh23e3YAxYBYDAPAgM,J35mMqZOsmvjpV Z77labzg/playfair/1//
There also iTunes on Freenet - SSK@0AtjJ4FQD4seLtw5Z2cAAdGy~UAPAgM/iTunes/10//
Both are edition sites. I've retrieved both on the "unstable" network. As usual, the freeent keys have been mangled by Slashdot's spacing, so remove the spaces in the keys!