Apple Sends Cease-and-Desist To the Hymn Project 444
Troed writes "Tools for removing DRM from iTunes-purchased songs (myFairTunes7, QtFairUse6) have been available from the Hymn Project Web site for some time. These are legal in many countries. But on the 20th Apple sent a Cease and Desist note to Hymn's ISP, forcing the site admins to remove all download links. It is speculated that this is due to a new tool being created (Requiem) that attacks Apple's FairPlay DRM through cryptographic means instead of by copying the unprotected music from memory while it is being played. But since the tools are no longer available (after several days there are still no public mirrors), discussion around this topic has died out. Many users buy music from the iTunes store and rely on DRM removal to be able to play the content on their mobile phones. Apple may be on dangerous ground here, since those users might now start checking out competing services."
Why bother with the iTunes Store anymore? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Everyone send in donations (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why bother with the iTunes Store anymore? (Score:5, Informative)
Some of us want particular songs. iTMS has many more songs than Amazon at this point.
Re:torrents (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Beating the Bully (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is, in the United States they often do have a legal leg to stand on, in the form of the DMCA. That doesn't make it right, or just, or even good business
Cease and Desist *Letter* not *Order* (Score:5, Informative)
A C&D ORDER on the other hand, comes from a court and you'd better do what it says or risk pissing off the judge. Almost always a bad idea.
In any case, a C&D Letter can be responded to by a letter of your own back to the sender requesting "clarification", setting off a torrent ( :-) ) of correspondence that could level a forest while consuming time as you continue to do as you please. Or you could just use it to pre-emptively go to court and threaten the sender with attempting to interfere with your business/life/whatever by harassing you. And you will have the letter/evidence in hand, signed by the sender.
And of course, in the greatest of Slashdot Traditions, IANAL.
Re:Beating the Bully (Score:5, Informative)
In point of fact, there is exactly one way for any party to ask the courts to give their opinion of what's legal and what isn't: filing a lawsuit. And in this case, Apple hasn't even gone that far. All they've done so far is send a letter to Harmony saying, "we think what you're doing infringes our rights, and if you keep doing it we're willing to take the matter in front of a judge."
By itself, that letter holds little or no legal value. It certainly hasn't been endorsed by any court. About all it does is prevent a defendant from saying, "I was ambushed.. if they'd only asked me to stop, I would have," when the matter actually does appear in front of a judge. And since there's absolutely no legal force behind this kind of C&D letter -- not even an immediate threat of a lawsuit -- the courts don't give a flying shit what they say.
Now, if Apple had actually filed a bogus lawsuit simply to harass the defendant, that is illegal: It's called barratry. [wikipedia.org] And the courts have no problem slapping down plaintiffs who can be proved to have engaged in that
Whether you like it or not, though, Apple is on the side of the angels here, at least in terms of legal fitness. Stripping the DRM off a purchased song when you already hold a legitimate key is a legal grey area, and Apple hasn't pushed too hard on that question. Cryptographic attacks that make it possible for someone to unlock a track even if they don't hold a legitimate key are gonna be pretty hard to defend in court. So there's a legitimate question as to whether the tools are legal at all. Apple has contracts with the labels which require Apple to watch out for this kind of thing, and Apple faces contract penalties or harder negotiations on future contracts if the labels decide Apple isn't working hard enough to guard the barn door. So Apple stands to be injured if the tools are illegal and the distributor keeps handing them out. That means Apple has 'standing' to sue.
So when Apple's lawyers wrap those two facts up in a letter and say, "the fastest and easiest way for you not to hurt us in a way that would lead to us suing for damages is to stop distributing the tools," that's frickin' polite.
When you finally grow out of thinking C&D letters are a form of extortion, you'll see that they're a proper and necessary part of a legal system with many players who hold diverse interests. It isn't Harmony's responsibility to check every possible law and every possible player in the market and bulletproof themselves against any suggestion of stepping on someone's before deciding what to do next. They're free to do their thing, and if Apple sees a legal issue, it's Apple's responsibility to A) discover the problem and B) let Harmony know that there might be a problem.
The proper response to such a letter is to have your own lawyer talk to Apple's lawyers and work out a solution that makes everyone happy. The C&D letter is a request to start a conversation about legal matters where both parties have an interest, and to work out a compromise where both sides can move forward with as many of their own legitimate interests intact as possible.
For all we know, Apple's lawyers might tell Harmony, "according to our engineers, changing these bits of the program right here would put you completely in the clear.. of course we're not allowed to say that in public for fear of reprisals from the record labels. But legal conversations are privileged and you'd be able to subpoena the information from us if we went to court anyway, so what the heck." That's unlikely, but at least give Apple the chance to have a conversation before pumping bricks out your ass over how they're such big mean stinky poopyheads.
Re:Yeah, okay (Score:1, Informative)
Re:In Apple's defense (Score:2, Informative)
True, Pepsi [wikipedia.org] would have been a better choice for the analogy :p
Re:A few thoughts from the author (Score:3, Informative)
Re:In Apple's defense (Score:1, Informative)
iii) You shall be authorized to use the Products on five Apple-authorized devices at any time, except in the case of Movie Rentals, as described below.
It then goes on to not explain at all which devices are Apple-authorised and which aren't. So, who is stealing from who? Are you 'stealing' music from Apple by playing it on a Creative Zen instead of an iPod? Or are Apple stealing your goddamn freedom from you because they want to control how you listen to the music that you bought?
Seriously, the lengths you'll go to in order to defend Apple are ridiculous.
Re:Damn Sony and their DRM! (Score:4, Informative)
And for some support for all the anal replies about the specific dates:
XP officially came out in 2001, however there were 'liberated' versions floating around the warez groups of beta versions for a long while before the official release
Plus, even I remember a number of XP themes released for the betas that were out years before the official release also.
* Not to imply you were using That
I didnt even bother looking up when OS X came out, cuz it doesnt at all matter.
The OS X hype was out YEARS before OS X was, and you would have to be living under one of slashdots many rocks at the time to have misesd it
Re:Why bother with the iTunes Store anymore? (Score:4, Informative)
Songs don't just magically appear when an online store signs a deal with a label. Rather, they start making songs available over time, and it can take quite a while before they have them all. The last album I bought was the second album from the Urban Verbs (a sadly overlooked band--their lead singer was the brother of the Talking Heads drummer, and so people just pigeonholed them as a Heads wannabe). When I bought it a few weeks ago, it was on iTunes and not Amazon. Now it is on Amazon. At the same time, I bought a Julia Ecklar album that was on both, so I bought it from Amazon.
Re:It's theft of service (Score:3, Informative)
Re:As a myFairTunes user... (Score:3, Informative)
Because I don't live in the United States, so Amazon's mp3 store is not available to me.
And also because I like music from local artists over here, and Amazon doesn't offer that while iTunes has pretty good coverage.
Re:LINK? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How to rip iTunes (or other) DRMd material (Score:3, Informative)
You have the added bonus that recording from wave out is always lower quality than the input. Certainly my sound card is such that the output quality is a bunch lower than any input. Try it yourself; get a nice lossless file, follow your steps, compare the new version with the old. it'll sound noticably worse unless you have some pretty funky hardware.
Finally, it's bloody annoying. I mean I have upwards of 30,000 music tracks on my computer, what if I had to do that with all of them? With a couple of months of music, I could easily see me spending all my free time for years getting this done. Sorry, but that's not acceptable.