Speaking of open source projects that probably have Apple's lawyers gnashing their teeth and tugging at their leashes, wouldja believe that PlayFair has risen from its ashes once again? In case you haven't been following this particular saga, PlayFair is an application that exists solely to take songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store and strip out every last remnant of Apple's FairPlay Digital Rights Management code while leaving the music itself untouched and at full quality. So, armed with a copy of PlayFair, you could turn your purchased songs into unprotected AAC files that you could then play on non-iPod devices; on non-Mac, non-Windows computers; on unauthorized computers; and in non-iTunes jukebox applications. All those restrictions about "play only on five computers, burn playlists only seven times, avoid partially hydrogenated oils" vaporize like snow in a frying pan.

Apple, of course, was none too pleased, and had its lawyers send a nasty note to SourceForge, who distributed PlayFair. SourceForge caved and pulled the software. Seeking to avoid further legal tussles, PlayFair's developers moved it to Sarovar, a hosting site in India; Apple sent out another cease-and-desist letter via local counsel, and Sarovar soon buckled, too. And then iTunes 4.5 came along, which reportedly messed with the way that PlayFair did its thing. Could this have been the end of PlayFair?

Well, it could have been, but it wasn't. Faithful viewer frozen tundra informs us that PlayFair is now back on the 'net, reborn as hymn (a rather labored acronym for "hear your music anywhere"). Somebody named Anand Babu has "taken official ownership of the project," and plans to fight any possible Apple legal threats with support from FSF India. Anand insists that hymn's purpose is "for fair use" of iTMS songs under copyright law, e.g. playing legally purchased songs privately on a Linux system, "and not for 'piracy'"; to underscore this point, hymn strips out DRM code while leaving the Apple ID of the purchaser intact, apparently to allow Apple to trace any pirated songs back to their source.

Which is all well and good, but it seems to us that Apple's objection to hymn probably wouldn't have much to do with copyright law, but rather with the iTunes Music Store's license agreement. We're not going to dig it up right now, because legalese before noon sends us straight into a coma, but we have to assume there's something in there about agreeing not to bypass the DRM in any purchased song. And if hymn's custodians are planning to argue that terms-of-use software licenses are inherently void for some reason, they might want to get rid of the "This program is protected by the GNU General Public License" on hymn's home page notice before Apple gets a screenshot. Just in case.

While we're all for fair use of copyrighted material (our TiVo still can't play iTMS songs, for example), the crux of the hymn tussle really seems to come down to licensing. Like it or not, the labels have the legal right to restrict who sells their recordings; they granted Apple a license to sell those songs at the iTMS subject to certain conditions, one of which was no doubt that Apple would adequately protect the music from being pirated. So Apple may have to go after hymn, or else lose its license from the labels-- which would shut the iTMS down overnight, at which point there'd be nothing left for hymn users to Play Fair with, and nobody's happy. Granted, we're just guessing, here, but it's not exactly a far-fetched scenario.

Our ideal outcome is that Apple fights just enough to keep the labels from yanking their catalogs, but not enough to cause the hymn folks much grief. So much for the best of all possible worlds, hmmm?