PlayFair goes offshore

Written by tinfoil on Saturday, 10 April 2004 17:01

Apple, using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, asked SourceForge to take down the PlayFair project. In response to this request, the hosting provider for the project was switched to one offshore.

PlayFair (more here) is an open source project that allows one to remove the FairPlay digital rights management (DRM) from songs purchased from the iTunes music store in the AAC format. To do this, PlayFair uses Jon Johansen's (same guy who cracked the DVD encryption some years ago) work. PlayFair allows the previously DRM protected files to be played on Linux machines, smartphones or any other MP3 player that supports AAC.

Because SourceForge is an Online Service Provider (OSP), they could have used the Safe Harbor provision of the DMCA as retaliation for Apple's request but did not. The new location for PlayFair is at Sarovar, a hosting company for software libre projects based in Trivandrum, India.

Source: Dsounds

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