PlayFair pulled again

"[PlayFair] ... is causing them enormous potential loss of revenue and reputation"

Bull. For starters notice the key word: potential. Also, because you have to have an iPod to decode the song, and you have to have actually bought the song, the loss of revenue is minimal. As for reputation, doing this is causing harm to their reputation.

Also:

"This program was previously hosted on a website called "SourceForge". When our clients addressed a cease and desist letter to SourceForge, the
website removed the program immediately from its server, in recognition of the fact that PlayFair compromised the intellectual property rights of our
clients. "

No, it wasn't because they recognized that "fact," it was because Apple was using an (unconstitutional) law against them. When people threaten lawsuits, other people jump.

And, after reading the letter to sarovar, I notice that they have no legal recourse- they try to get sarovar to take it down because they should agree that no open source website should host such a program. Hahahaha. Sovereignty rocks.

"I am the playfair author... 2. I think $0.99 is a fair price, too. I just (a) philosophically disagree with DRM and (b) want to be able to play the songs that I have legally purchased outside of iTunes / Quicktime..."

Well, isn't that special.

Disgaree all you want. But if you publish a tool that has no significant competing use besides cracking Apple's DRM and potentially punching a big hole in the business model of them and everyone else in the supply chain, this is what you should expect.

You agreed to a license. Abide by it or cancel it.

You can do your "b" by doing what's allowed - burn and re-rip. Maybe that's too much work. Hard to say. But don't expect to flout it and walk away.

It's easy to bypass the DRM.. just use Toast to Burn the songs to a Disk-Image and re-rip them off the "virtual" cd.. takes me all of a few minutes and sounds just fine.

apple4ever has a point when he uses the magic keyword "unconstitutional".. Actually, the software just allow you to do something you can do legally, I don't see the problem with it beside the new DMCA act that prevent any software like this, even if it is legit, because the DMCA in itself is illegal..

when you buy a CD, you have the right to make copies for yourself (one to leave in the heat in the car, one at the "chalet", one at work, etc etc). The only difference now is that we use the computer more and more to play music, and don't want to deal with hundreds of backup copies, so we just copy the song file. The DRM limit this copy to a few, or unlimited if we are willing to loose quality by burn-n-rip. Otherwise it's like saying that for the whole family to listen to the new cd you just bought at Wal Mart, they ALL (or in fact All minus 3) need to pay..

, I don't see the problem with it beside the new DMCA act that prevent any software like this, even if it is legit, because the DMCA in itself is illegal..

Well, its contrary that a 'law' can be 'illegal'. Illegal means "against the law", but this obviously isn't.

It may be unconstitutional, but that's neither here nor there until you get someone to overturn the law.

What you all should do is contact you congressmen. As we now have republicans in the house, senate, and white house, now is the perfect time to get this repealed! The 'rights of citizens' conservatives will no doubt be behind us on this one. What? What do you mean they're the ones who passed it? That can't be! The republicans are for freedom of choice and a smaller, less restrictive government. They aren't the type to try to reduce our rights through things like Patriot Acts, DMCA laws, amendments to ban gay marriage, are they?

Oh, and can one of you constitutional scholars out there tell us where the DCMA violates the constitution of the US?

As far as DRM's go, FairPlay is aptly named. You can burn tracks to CD's as many times as you want, you can put them onto as many iPods as you want, and you can listen to them on 3 PC's. The DRM as posted earlier is also pretty easy to remove, even within iTunes itself (burn, re-rip).

It's a great compromise, allowing Apple to provide an extensive music selection available for purchase online. Without it, the iTunes Music Store could not exist. I think it was cynical and arrogant to write a tool to make it even easier to circumvent the DRM.

And there IS a potential loss of revenue. Only one person has to purchase the tracks from iTMS, but once that person uses PlayFair and puts the tracks on Kazaa, thousands of others can download it for free.

Yes, that same person could do the same thing with burn/re-rip, but the point of FairPlay isn't to make it impossible to illegally distribute copies of music, rather the point is to make legal use of the music the easy, convenient thing to do.

The PlayFair author's a jerk.

If people like being able to purchase music online, but do not like DRM, then they need to think about which is more important, because the online music business model cannot succeed without DRM.

If you don't like DRM, don't buy it. Seriously, buy the CD or find another download service you feel is more to your liking.

People can dispute the DRM and the law all they want, but it really doesn't matter. Don't like something, don't buy it.

Just curious, has the author of "PlayFair" even been laid????

The big difference here is that the iTMS songs are more restricted than they would be if you just bought the CD... I think that was actually the huge push that got the music industry interested. Buy a regular CD and I can give it to 50,000,000 people... But the iTMS version and I gan give it to 2 people besides myself... I think the music industry sees this as being better than physical CDs...

A lot of people seem to misunderstand the issue here. The specifics of Playfair vs. Fairplay aren't really that important. The question is, can you write and distribute software to manipulate your data (which you paid for in this case) in a manner you choose?

Regarding the Sourceforge hosting, Apple legal had the dubious right under the DMCA to demand a takedown, because the nature of the software is to bypass copy-protection and the DMCA forbids that. This is probably unconstitutional in the US because it's far too broad - even telling someone how to bypass any lame copy-protection scheme (and in the end, they're all lame eventually) is illegal. Even if it's just XOR. This abrogates a large part of the US First Amendment, since it makes a type of speech illegal - not because it's hateful or harmful to individuals, but because it might make the bottom line better in a relatively small but amazingly dog-wagging industry.

This threat against Sarovar is probably baseless - there's a lot of exhortation in the C&D and not a lot of oomph. Before the DMCA came about, the usual strategy was for big fish to threaten and bully little fish - "we may not have a legal leg to stand on, but we have enough lawyers and money to drag you through court and make your life hell unless you do what we want". This is a return to what's basically always been extortion.

Whether you agree with what the Playfair author has done or not, the question is whether people should be able to do this and similar things. You're throwing away a lot more than extra copies of iTMS songs here. Had DMCA-style provisions been in place from the start of IP law, there'd probably be no computer industry at all. It's that chilling.