Hymn (afkorting van “Hear Your Music aNywhere”) was een toepassing om FairPlay-DRM te verwijderen van muziek die in de iTunes Store was gekocht. Hymn is niet meer beschikbaar, maar deze pagina vertelt het verhaal ervan. We beginnen bij het begin.
Hymn heette oorspronkelijk PlayFair, dat op 5 april 2004 verscheen en werd gehost door SourceForge.
PlayFair was gemaakt door een anonieme auteur en was grotendeels gebaseerd op QTFairUse, gebouwd door DeCSS-auteur “DVD” Jon Lech Johansen en uitgebracht in januari 2004. DVD Jon nam de technieken van QTFairUse vervolgens op in VLC van VideoLAN en had in mei PlayFair terug in de VLC-codebase geïntegreerd.
Bij de release stond in de README van PlayFair:
The playfair program is quite simple. It takes one of the iTMS Protected AAC Audio Files, decodes it using a key obtained from your iPod or Microsoft Windows system and then writes the new, decoded version to disk as a regular AAC Audio File. It then optionally copies the metadata tags that describe the song, including the cover art, to the new file.
Op 9 april dwong Apple SourceForge de bestanden te verwijderen op basis van een DMCA-klacht tegen het omzeilen van kopieerbeveiliging. Enkele dagen later begon Sarovar, een Indiase gemeenschap voor de ontwikkeling van vrije software, PlayFair te hosten, maar hun Indiase hostingprovider werd op 6 mei door Apple gedwongen het project niet meer te hosten.
In mei 2004 werd het PlayFair-project nieuw leven ingeblazen door Anand Babu, hernoemd tot Hymn, verplaatst van playfair.org naar hymn-project.org en uitgebracht als versie 0.6.0 met steun van de Free Software Federation of India. Babu zette de versienummering van PlayFair voort, maar herschreef een groot deel van de app om niet meer afhankelijk te zijn van niet-GPL-afhankelijkheden. In de releasenotities stond:
The 0.6.0 release is pretty much a complete rewrite. There are no longer any non-GPL dependencies (the mp4v2 library was MPL and, thus, incompatible with the GPL). In fact, the MPEG-4 parsing is now home-grown and much more specific. Since weire no longer using the mp4v2 library to copy the meta data from the protected AAC file, it is left fully intact, including the apple ID of the user who bought the song. This proves that our purpose is for fair use and not for “piracy” and should help us in our legal battles.
Na de release van Hymn bleef het project online tot 2008. Versie 0.6.2 werd op 17 juni uitgebracht en voegde ondersteuning voor iTunes 4.6 toe, en 0.7.0 verscheen op 24 juli. Deze release bood gebruikers de extra mogelijkheid hun Apple ID uit onbeveiligde muziek te verwijderen. Hoewel de naam van het project Hymn bleef, verschoof de ontwikkeling naar de toepassing JHymn van FutureProof, waarbij de “J” aan de naam werd toegevoegd als verwijzing naar de Java-runtime waarop het draaide. (Verwarrend genoeg verschenen Hymn en JHymn onder deels dezelfde versienummers, en Hymn kwam later tot versie 0.8.0, maar de versienummering van JHymn haalde die van Hymn begin 2005 in.)
De homepage van Hymn maakte het standpunt van de auteurs duidelijk:
The purpose of the Hymn Project is to allow you to exercise your fair-use rights under copyright law. The various software provided on this web site allows you to free your iTunes Music Store purchases (protected AAC / .m4p) from their DRM restrictions /with no loss of sound quality/. These songs can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, even on operating systems not supported by iTunes and on hardware not supported by Apple.
Why use Hymn Project software?
- To decrypt your iTunes protected AAC files so that they can be played on operating systems for which no official version of iTunes exists, such as Linux.
- To use non-Apple AAC-capable hardware to play your music.
- To eliminate the five computer limit imposed by iTunes.
- To make archival backups of your music.
- As the first step in converting your music from protected AAC to MP3, Ogg, or your other favorite audio file format, for use with your non-iPod portable audio player.
- To demonstrate your belief in the principles of fair-use under copyright law.
In februari 2008 diende Apple een sommatie in om ermee te stoppen, wat uiteindelijk leidde tot de sluiting van het project.
Ironisch genoeg had Steve Jobs zich in 2003 tegenover Rolling Stone minachtend over DRM uitgelaten en gezegd:
None of this technology that you’re talking about’s gonna work. We have Ph.D.s here who know the stuff cold, and we don’t believe it’s possible to protect digital content.
In 2007 schreef Jobs een open brief op de site van Apple, waarin hij mensen die ontevreden waren over DRM aanmoedigde de muziekindustrie ervan te overtuigen de DRM-eisen te laten vallen die ze Apple hadden opgelegd:
The problem, of course, is that there are many smart people in the world, some with a lot of time on their hands, who love to discover such secrets and publish a way for everyone to get free (and stolen) music. They are often successful in doing just that, so any company trying to protect content using a DRM must frequently update it with new and harder to discover secrets. It is a cat-and-mouse game. Apple’s DRM system is called FairPlay. While we have had a few breaches in FairPlay, we have been able to successfully repair them through updating the iTunes store software, the iTunes jukebox software and software in the iPods themselves. So far we have met our commitments to the music companies to protect their music, and we have given users the most liberal usage rights available in the industry for legally downloaded music.
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Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.
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So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies. Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.