Apple Closes ‘Fair Use’ Music Project

Apple has forced an Indian Website to take down a software project that can be used to enable 'fair use' of music purchased from Apple's iTunes music service.

The PlayFair project was taken down on April 16 by Sarovar after receiving a cease and desist letter from Apple Computer Corp. The Indian organization Sarovar is a facility for free software creators and provides the same facilities as the Sourceforge project, based in the US, does.

PlayFair allows people to play music on non-Apple authorised hardware, provided an authorised key is available. It removes the Digital Rights Management from a song if the key to playing the song is available.

Playfair was originally hosted at Sourceforge but Apple invoked the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and forced the takedown of the program.

Read more at TheAge.com.