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."

Comments

Coverage on K5 also.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some nice discussion here.

Contents of the Letter (playfair.txt)

[ixt]

(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

Re:Software Lock-in

[iantri]

Aah.. but not true.

You might find this plugin quite helpful. This thread has more info.

must be legal off the coast of New Zealand

[kayen_telva]

Playfair

Read the "Terms Of Service"

[supercobrajet428]

A Quote from the "Terms Of Service" which you MUST AGREE TO in order to purchase tracks from the ITMS:

Any burning or exporting capabilities are solely an accommodation to you and shall not constitute a grant or waiver (or other limitation or implication) of any rights of the copyright owners in any content, sound recording, underlying musical composition, or artwork embodied in any Product.

You agree that you will not attempt to, or encourage or assist any other person to, circumvent or modify any security technology or software that is part of the Service or used to administer the Usage Rules.

The delivery of Products does not transfer to you any commercial or promotional use rights in the Products.

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.

Re:Read the "Terms Of Service"

[Fnkmaster]

Well, there's no reason to believe that the person who wrote the software needed to violate this EULA - they didn't necessarily ever buy any music from Apple or agree to the EULA. Whether using such a piece of software that somebody else wrote constitutes violation of this EULA is a less obvious question based on that wording.

In any case, breaking an EULA without redistributing somebody else's copyrighted material is one of those offenses which you won't find much support for on Slashdot. People here generally support the concept of electronic freedom - data you've acquired legally is yours to do what you will with within the bounds of your own home and computer. It's like breaking the speedlimit on your own private racetrack - it may be illegal, but it shouldn't be enforceable. And even here in the grand ole' USA EULAs are of questionable enforceability (mind you, at SourceForge.net, the issue was the unconstitutional legislation we call the DMCA, it had nothing to do with the EULA which SF.net had certainly never agreed to).

Of course, in India, it doesn't matter, since the people distributing Playfair at sandovar.org didn't write it, AND because they lived in India, were almost certainly not iTunes customers. Thus we have no reason to believe they had ever agreed to this EULA in the first place - assuming such EULAs are even recognized under Indian law, which I seriously doubt. In most countries' legal systems, click through screens don't make legitimate contracts.

Re:Let's face it...

[bryanp]

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.

RTFA before you mod, please

[ronmon]

A "cracker-program"? Hardly. Just a snippet from the sarovar response:

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, less restricted format.

3. PlayFair is not a method for making illegal copies of iTunes songs. PlayFair by itself cannot be used to copy music to CD, distribute on a peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing network, play music or edit songs.

4. PlayFair saves time in converting songs. The Apple iPod permits the iTunes user to make a music CD out of iTunes songs. After that the user can convert the songs in that CD to MP3 or another digital format for playing on portable, non-Apple music players. By converting iTunes songs directly to a common digital format, PlayFair shortcuts this sequence by eliminating the need to make a CD and then convert it.

So read it and think again.

Indian law specifically protects PlayFair

[Sanity]

According to the FSF india post, Indian law specifically permits this kind of thing:

(ab)the doing of any act necessary to obtain information essential for operating inter-operability of an independently created computer programme with other programmes by a lawful possessor of a computer programme provided that such information is not otherwise readily available;

Moreover, it even deals with baseless threats such as Apple's:

Section 60. Remedy in the case of groundless threat of legal proceedings.- Where any person claiming to be the owner of copyright in any work, by circulars, advertisements or otherwise, threatens any other person with any legal proceedings or liability in respect of an alleged infringement of the copyright, any person aggrieved thereby may, notwithstanding anything contained in section 34 of the Specific Relief Act, 1963 (47 of 1963), institute a declaratory suit that the alleged infringement of any legal rights of the person making such threats and may in any such suit-
(a) obtain an injunction against the continuance of such threats; and
(b) recover such damages, if any, as he has sustained by reason of such threats.

So PlayFair may even be able to take action against Apple for this!