FairPlay (original) (raw)

FairPlay is Apple Computer's name for its digital rights management (DRM) built in to the iTunes Music Store. FairPlay is considered to be one of the most reasonable DRM implementations available at present, since it is relatively user friendly, and not as restrictive as some systems. However there will always be critics of any form of DRM; many feel that any restrictions at all are too many.

FairPlay, attached to all for-pay iTMS tracks, makes the following requirements:

• The track may be copied to any number of iPod portable music players.
• The track may be played on up to three authorized computers.
• The track may be copied to a standard CD audio track any number of times. (The resulting CD has no DRM and may be re-converted to MP3, but this will aggravate the sound artifacts of encoding, since the resulting sound file will have been encoded twice).
• A particular playlist within iTunes containing a FairPlay track can only be copied to a CD up to ten times before the playlist must be changed.