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Apple Hides Account Info in DRM-Free Music
Alvis Dark writes "Apple launched iTunes Plus earlier today, the fruit of its agreement with EMI to sell DRM-free music. What they didn't say is that all DRM-free tracks have the user's full name and account e-mail embedded in them. Is this to discourage people from throwing the tracks up on their favorite P2P platform? 'It would be trivial for iTunes to report back to Apple, indicating that "Joe User" has M4As on this hard drive belonging to "Jane Userette," or even "two other users." This is not to say that Apple is going to get into the copyright enforcement business. What Apple and indeed the record labels want to watch closely is, will one user buy music for his five close friends?'"
There is always a little line written in 4 point at the bottom.
Living With a Nerd
Is that you can buy them and give them to your friends, whereas the music download sites seem to be headed toward preventing you from letting anyone else play your purchase.
music always know where to find you.
You can right click on the file and convert it to mp3, which would erase all tracks.
This shouldn't matter anyway.
Gone!
That doesn't sound bad at all to me. So what if my information is in my DRM-Free music?
I'm not going to put it up on P2P sites!
And since it's DRM free they can't "disable" my songs because I gave my friend a copy of one of my MP3s, and I'm pretty sure you can easily bring up fair-use when sharing with one friend in court.
meh..
Let's see how many people are outraged when Apple does something like this, as opposed to say, Sony or Microsoft. I'm definitely not approving or defending any company doing this kind of thing, but I do expect a bit of a disconnect as to the reaction. Call me cynical.
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
Apple puts this metadata in all the iTMS songs. Unless you're actually planning to break the law by sharing the songs, I don't see what the problem is. In fact this issue seems like a good way to distinguish between those who are against DRM because it restricts their rights to legally use their music, and those who actually just want to pirate music but use rights-based DRM arguments as an cover
Apple isn't keeping tabs on anyone, and it would be trivial to remove this data from your songs. But the question remains why anyone feels violated by this
Wouldn't it be trivial to write an application to replace your (or other people's) names from these file headers just by replacing the strings with "Benny Beanfart" or similar?
Wasn't the deal that DRM be replaced with some kind of watermark? Kinda nasty that with the plaintext name and e-mail though...
Is my info in there?
Don't tell me you can't find out just because the ones before were DRMd. People were breaking that since the first one came out.
Should it be there? No. But black eyes heal as this one will when they remove it from future songs they put up.
Can't be too difficult to code up a utility to strip out such tags (?)
But then I've just moved to a Mac so I don't know my way around too well yet
It will prevent anyone but you using the music, will help them track down file sharers, and will increase the value of CD's ...
What no one thought of is that if you lose your iPod, without much effort you will become the RIAA's brand new Public Enemy Number One...
Sigh
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
This doesn't really bother me. I buy music and don't give it away, which is as it should be. TANSTAAFL!
This seems completely reasonable to me. I'm willing to trade watermarking for DRM, and am happily downloading my first iTunes purchase ever as we speak.
I do have one concern: if somebody does a legitimate transfer of their music (deleting all of the copies they own in the process), what happens if the new owner decides to put the stuff on a P2P network?
The whole point of DRM is to stop people from pirating it. If your name is attached to it I'd say that's a pretty good deterrent. Beyond that, you can download the music, burn it, transfer it from your home PC to your office PC - you can do what you want with it... the only restriction is that you can't illegally share it online. It's focusing on punishing people who share music illegally, while at the same time not hassling the end users who just want to use their music. This is exactly what DRM should be.
You buy music for your personal use, which includes fair use such as sharing it with your spouse or playing AAC files under Linux or on non-Apple devices. If your music gets stolen, wouldn't you want Apple to notify you and help you close that security breach as well a punish the thief?
I'd like a few more details, please.
Do they "hide" it in the files, or put it into the comment fields? There's a difference there, especially if you want to accuse them of underhand dealings.
The article is also pretty crappy on the suggestion to convert to MP3. Why should I do that? A simple binary find&replace will be faster, safer and result in no quality loss or recoding troubles.
So a little more info on this before painting anyone as a devil would be cool.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I find it a little hard to get worked up over this. I don't find the idea of watermarking particularly offensive, as long as it's not done in such a way as to degrade the content (which all "analog preservable" watermarking does), and it's not part of a DRM scheme (e.g. 'no copy' flag). Watermarking that only identifies a user and can be used to track down someone sharing files after the fact ... I can live with that.
The difference to me is that it's not trying to stop someone from doing something illegal, before they even do it. That I find very offensive, and is the whole point of DRM. I believe that the computer should let you do anything you damn well please, even if it's illegal, but that you should take the consequences later. Trading DRM for watermarking would be a huge step up, since the watermarking really doesn't affect anyone who isn't putting their tracks on P2P networks. However, we also need to realize that watermarks can't be viewed as inherently trustworthy -- what's to keep me from framing you by putting your account information on a bunch of music and then sharing it? Practically, I'm not sure how useful watermarking really is. But if it's the price for getting rid of DRM -- which treats everyone like criminals, regardless of whether they're doing anything illegal or not -- it's OK by me.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The entertainment industry is obsessed with the idea of "casual piracy," or the occasional sharing of content between friends.
Sad, because non-evil labels actually encourage sharing your music with friends.
I just wish I had friends to share my music with. =( No one else I know can stand Artemis, whose music sounds like a mix of Enya and trip-hop to me.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I'm thinking probably not too long.
I read Usenet for the articles.
Hidden in plain sight? While certainly not mentioned during the announcement, it does not seem there is anything hidden here. Unless there is data hidden in the track (stego style), this is quite a non-issue for those who want to take it off through an iTunes user-installed script (coming any day/hour now).
Apple's policy reminds me of the joke about the nervous dental patient letting the dentist drill only once the patient had grabbed the dentist's balls, saying "this is gonna hurt you more than it's gonna hurt me".
Anyone you share your music with has to be trusted to protect your personal info. If they can't, they probably can't be trusted with Apple's music info. Not a bad strategy for making privacy mutual.
Now if copyright law would just do the same. Anyone who copies my personal info outside the transaction for which I sent the personal info should be in violation of my copyright and the limited copyright under which I sent the info. Too clever - it will take a Constitutional Privacy Amendment to give laws like that the momentum they need to get passed.
--
make install -not war
Afterall, you're not trading the file to anyone - you're just manipulating data on your own PERSONAL computer.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
For people who aren't planning on using the absence of DRM to break the law, its not a problem.
For people who are planning on using the absence of DRM to break the law, since there is no encryption, erasing or altering the information in the copies they distribute ought to be trivial.
So, um, who really cares? This is pretty common in DRM-free purchased PDFs, I don't see why it would bother people in DRM-free purchased music.
...but in come the privacy concerns, of course.
1. is that information easily read from the files, or does it take a decryption key which, presumably, only Apple has?
2. regardless, what would Apple / EMI do with that information?
2a. Assume they don't use it to track down those who are liberally sharing music... are they using it for advertising purposes?
2b. Tracking purposes?
2c. Social networking (of the evil kind) purposes?
And, of course, cue the replies...
"removal tool in 3... 2.. 1..."
"let's replace it with Steve Jobs's account info!"
"let's put garbage data in there and flood the system with noise!"
etc.
Has Apple specified how the user info is stored and how it may be extracted/doctored? If not, has anyone reverse-engineered it?
... should be enough to solve the problem until someone releases a one-liner perl script to strip away the account info.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
as an occasional iTunes customer, I can't say that I really object to that kind of thing being done. There probably is no need for it, but it's not really problematic, either.
After all, if I buy music online, I really do not buy it to put those files on a P2P network - but for my personal use. And, maybe, to occasionally share one or two songs with friends, probably to give them a sample of some new album I bought and like. But beyond that? Why should I care that all the audio files on my playback and storage devices have my name imprinted in them?
Especially if I can get rid of that information in the files if I really want to?
This is really not a "big brother" type of situation, at least not as long as the iTunes application does not start snooping around for "probably stolen" non-DRM files. But for various reasons I'm fairly sure Apple knows better than trying to pull something like that off. The backlash would be destructive, to say the least.
A.
As I don't believe you're currently buying rights to the file, but still just buying a license to use it (or, at least, that's how the RIAA wishes it worked), said situation is "unsupported." If you no longer want a song, delete it, don't give it away. There is no way to prove you deleted the files and didn't keep a copy, somewhere.
Some will be pissed about this - there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Personally, I don't care if they put my name in the file.
I want DRM-free media. I've wanted it for a long time. I want to play my music where I want, how I want, on as many devices as I want. And the whole time I've wanted that - it's never been so I can give it away to people on the internet. No one who wants to pursue this as a way of doing business is going to believe any differently.
I love buying my music via downloads. I wish I could do that with movies (not the 320x240 video iPod stuff - I mean movies for my TV), but I run Linux, I have a non-iPod player, so I need platform-independent, DRM free media.
They want to put my name in it? Go ahead. I'm not putting it out in the wild - and with any properly run computer - accidental release shouldn't be likely either.
Running Windows^H^H^H^H^H^H^H OSX and Linux in the home. (I don't have time for Solitaire any more.)
Some people are never happy.
If you never share your music on any P2P networks this will never be an issue. You have your music, and you can make as many copies as you want for yourself. Legally.
What Apple and indeed the record labels want to watch closely is, will one user buy music for his five close friends?'
And how will they know this? Unless the music players start phoning home with the player's IP and the "watermark" info from the tracks. And if that's the plan, then that's a much bigger story here, no?
For the DRM'd tracks, it was used for authentication. For the new ones, well, the info is still there though the DRM is gone.
Perhaps you'd like it removed and all data scrubbed and maybe an account info that said "pYrAt3 m333!!!!111!!"
Does the license under which I "buy" these DRM-free songs permit me to strip this personally-identifiable information from the songs?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
First too few colors, now too many bits.
It's perfectly legal for me to buy a CD and make copies for all of my friends, and it would be just as legal for me to do the same with these files.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
It's not a question of getting spied on - well, it actually is, so effem! All this crap can really piss one off.
Maybe doing a binary compare of the same file downloaded under two users would clarify that?
This is such a non-issue that I'm surprised people are taking this claim seriously.
First of all, that information has always been in music purchased from iTunes, protected or not.
Second of all, it's easily scrubbed metadata.
Reporting this like it's new and a serious issue is naive.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this exactly how jhymn and other similar programs leave your files? IIRC, jhymn will remove the DRM from the file, but still leave your AppleID, etc in the file. It seems that the only people complaining about this are the ones who want to pirate music.
This guy's the limit!
I personnaly don't mind, that sounds like a reasonnable way to enforce the rights of the content owner while giving all the freedom to the customer, to use its purchase as she wants to.
Isn't that the entire basis of the concept of the Rule of Law?
It's different if there's an invasion of privacy, but we haven't seen any such invasion.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This makes sense to me. And makes it less of a headache for me to manage my music. Of course, I'm one of those wackos who tries to purchase all of his music.
This means I can easily go through my collection and find music that I've borrowed from my friends and delete it if I decide it's not something I want to purchase. It also means I can tell the difference between what I have purchased and what I haven't. I have almost 8000 legal mp3s, so keeping track of them is no longer trivial.
What will happen to a poor Joe Luser if his laptop with all his music gets lost or stolen and some kind soul uploads his 1000 music files onto P2P network. His name and email address is there for everyone to see. Apple and RIAA are after him. How will he prove himself innocent?
...but copyright infringement is breaking the law.
[Real CDs] you can buy them and give them to your friends
So long as you don't rip them with iTunes. A violation of trust is a something that sticks with the violator. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The concept of using a watermarking technique is itself much better than any sort of DRM. But if the watermark is not correctly cryptographically tied into the song, then it is probably quite easy to forge watermarks. What this means is that it would be possible to still distribute thse songs (illegally) but have it appear as if somebody else did it. This is probably worse than having no watermark at all.
Of course, technically, forgeable watermarks should carry no legal weight, and should be useful for nothing more than casual marketing analysis. But we all know how things like the courts, BSA, RIAA, and so forth work. "Hey, this song found on xxxxx P2P service has your name on it! You must be guilty. Here's notice of our lawsuit, or you can settle for $100000 per song." I see a lot more innocent grandmothers getting sued in the future.
The same thing could actually be used for other file formats. Want to write a Word document outlining your plans to rob the bank; be sure to "steal" somebody else's GUID out of one of their documents and replace the one in yours. Now you've got a better shot at deniability of wrongdoing.
Someone needs to write a program that inserts Bill Gates name and email address into the tags. Only he has enough money to pay of the MAFIAA.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Privacy is actually important: saying anything of the form "people don't need privacy 'x' if they don't plan to break the law" is almost always a mistake.
Right, but that's not what we're talking about. Your songs with your embedded tags aren't made public. Your privacy isn't being violated.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You're just regurgitating the age-old "Why should I worry about this draconian law? I'm not a criminal." argument. Buying a music file means that you buy a music file. Not a music file with extra unwanted information that might violate my privacy.
I certainly won't do business with Apple is any way, shape, or form.
I don't respond to AC's.
An easy way for me and my 1,203,382 roommates to keep track of what belongs to who ;)
I simply don't need another way for somebody to get my information.
Who is going to get the information in your ID3 tags?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The "spotlight" feature in OS X is supposed to be able to search metadata of many filetypes. Is it possible it will be enhanced (or can already?) search this info inside the music that's cataloged in iTunes?
If so, this seems like it could be beneficial if, say, you received a number of songs from a friend (ok, let's assume this is done "legally" for the moment), and you wanted to search for all of those just by searching on your friend's name.
I'm not trying to defend Apple here. I think any additional info of this sort that's tacked on to your files should at least be disclosed, with an option given to strip it back off of the files if you wish. But Apple has always been a company that enjoys (and seems to profit from) keeping little secrets about their products. OS X has loads of "undocumented features", and most of their apps have similar hidden "extras" built into them. I can easily see them incorporating this not because of any intention of actually gathering up your personal data or assisting in "copyright enforcement" -- but more because it would make another powerful "ability" of their search tool that the public didn't expect it was capable of.
Heck, even iTunes can work with multiple song libraries by holding down the "option" key when it first boots. Does it ever tell you that's an option when you run it? Nope!
"I'm willing to trade watermarking for DRM"
You already traded more money for non-DRM, now you have to trade your privacy.
I would say you're willing to do anything for music. In fact, it would be cheaper just to buy the CD used. Then you get no DRM and you keep your privacy.
But that would mean you have to be an adult and wait a week for the music. Oh dear. That might be hard.
typical hippie commie bullshit from the biggest computer cult of all time....
"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me...you can't get fooled again."
--The Decider, 2002
why? forty-two.
Congrats on Apple Fanboy post #1!
keep it real homie.
Word!
we'll never stop the pirates until we invent drm for gold coins and treasure chests.
If not, it seems to me it would be fairly trivial to plant something innocuous like "Steve Jobs" "sjobs@apple.com" into the file and put it up.
I often see people saying "you can just encode it into MP3 but with a loss of quality", like it says ITFA, but can't you just decode the AAC file and then recode it back without any loss but stripping the user info from the songs?
Like zipping files?
I don't see what the problem is. In fact this issue seems like a good way to distinguish between those who are against DRM because it restricts their rights to legally use their music, and those who actually just want to pirate music but use rights-based DRM arguments as a cover
You don't see what's wrong because you have your head shoved too far up the MAFIAA's lie. The question you should ask yourself is why you pay taxes to "protect" this content. The RIAA and MPAA have made it virtually impossible for non members to proffit from broadcast media, so copyright reduces to simple extortion. It's unnatural and immoral to keep people from sharing but digital restrictions will do that forever. The extreme lengths the industry has gone to protect their government imposed monopoly only highlight how wrong the laws are to begin with. You would be hard pressed to find anyone, let alone a majority of any population, who would jail their neighbor and confiscate their house because their neighbor gave them coppies of movies and songs. Yet that's what the law prescribes, $500,000 per offense and jail time. How can you fail to see what's wrong with that? Do you think libraries should be burnt before they go digital?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"Wasn't the deal that DRM be replaced with some kind of watermark? Kinda nasty that with the plaintext name and e-mail though..."
Yes. Keeping people honest is nasty. Especially seeing as they can't do it themselves.
I think at some point we have got to compromise. There must be a balance where our fair use rights are preserved and the copyright owners are protected from infringement.
I don't like the idea of my personal information being embedded in a file but unless someone breaks into my computer and rips a copy it won't really impact me. Well except I'll not be able to buy online music for anyone else but I've never done that anyway.
This or something similar may be the compromise we need to allow us to backup and play our music where we want while allowing corporate bean counters to sleep a bit easier.
On the other hand, the files might be watermarked in other ways, obviously more difficult to detect.
Of course it's entirely possible that Apple has actually decided to use this information in some way, which will affect mostly non-technically inclined people who are unaware of the tagging. And would be supremely stupid.
Imagine if they managed to trace back all those Bruce Wayne Campbell tracks in your collection? Oh the humanity.
...what's to say that they aren't already encoding this into the audio? If they really want to "nail" people, there are better ways to do it.
Wasn't the deal that DRM be replaced with some kind of watermark? Kinda nasty that with the plaintext name and e-mail though...
It's worse than you think. You should expect the invisible watermark to contain the same information on both the DRM'd and non DRM'd versions. The text tag has made their intentions clear, so you should expect them to use all means available to carry out those intentions. Digital Restrictions suck life, deal or no deal, because the penalty for sharing is outrageous. The ultimate deal is given to you in "FBI" warnings everytime you play a movie: share and you can lose your life's savings, spend time in jail and have your career wrecked. The draconian measures are required because laws against sharing are immoral and people have to be cowed into obeying them.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Note that you do not have to actually go into one of those menu items to get hit by it -- you just have to be in a menu that might list one of those menus. For example, suppose you enter the "Movies" menu. In order to know if it can display the "iTunes Top Movies" menu item in the list or not, it has to tickle the iTunes store. The store is probably so busy at the moment it is returning errors or mangled data that is causing the app to crash. Yes, it shouldn't crash, but it will likely go away once the store gets back on its feet.
Who is to prove i *Gave* it away? In todays world its far to easy to have your drives contents copied without your permission or knowledge.
Also, can i not sell the song down the road if i delete it from my HD? I can do that with a CD.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And the irony is that the industry in general has made a ton of money from people buying a copy of something and giving it to four or five of their friends. I even recall some type of study about how much money they were making from "tape traders," who for some odd reason would buy music just to make copies for their friends...and replicate that all across the country, and you have a lot of money changing hands. The study even went so far as to have a psychological profile of a "tape trader" as if it was almost some type of disorder.
I think a lot of shareware was registered like that as well, and now that everyone is getting so anal about locking it down on one computer (as if computers never crash), it wouldn't surprise me one bit if everyone in general was making less money with everything locked down then they were back in the good ol' days when everyone had a little freedom.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
I am happy that I know that my account info is embedded into the tracks! Could have prevented a legal problem. I may or may not have aquired 90+% of my music from pirate torrents. However, I never plan to -- nor have I ever -- posted my legally purchased CD or AAC files to a pirate site. I seed any torrents to at least a 2.0 ratio and that is where my (and most peoples) contribution to piracy ends. This just makes posting the files even less appealing. Anyway, I'm sure someone will figure out how to mangle the data shortly...
I will buy MORE music (but only my favorite singles) from iTunes Music Store than I did before. DRM really did not sit well with me... dependance sucks.
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
So who wants to be the first to try to sell one of these DRM-free songs on eBay?
I'm thinking it should be easier since the buyer doesn't need the original purchasers account info to activate and play the song. Or will eBay just pull the auction like last time.
What no one thought of is that if you lose your iPod, without much effort you will become the RIAA's brand new Public Enemy Number One..
The RIAA seeded the file sharing networks with watermarked files from the beginning. They could not admit it because it's hard to say you have been violated when you put the content on the sharing network yourself but you can be sure they used it to track down some of the earlier "pirates".
It's only a mater of time before people realize that the "pirates" were right. It's wrong to keep people from sharing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
They're called gift cards. I remember hearing plenty of commercials about being able to buy iTunes gift cards at Walmart.
Honestly, there would be no point to buy, then download, and then transfer a song to someone else as a gift. It's much less of a headache and much smarter overall to just buy them the CD instead of the tracks from it. Either that, or just get them a gift card and let them download the one file themself. They're going to have to download it one way or another. The only reason to do the 3-step version would be if the receiver of the gift can't install iTunes properly because Apple decided to require the program for their music store.
Quit being so paranoid. It's there so if you lose your MP3s whoever finds them knows where to return them!
the only restriction is that you can't illegally share it online. It's focusing on punishing people who share music illegally, while at the same time not hassling the end users who just want to use their music. This is exactly what DRM should be.
Ah, but why should sharing be against the law? What do you think of public libraries? Why doesn't every library have a large collection of songs and movies? Why shouldn't those libraries distribute that content digitally? As much as you might want it to be, a song is not property.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Is this watermarking? Or is this an account-identifying atom (like the same atoms they use in DRMed iTMS songs)?
If it's the latter, you can just extract the AAC samples and dump them in a fresh m4a file (with libmp4v2, for example).
karma: ouch!
...why they don't encode some kind of customer ID instead? Embedding your name and e-mail seems a bit strange. Is this Apple's revenge against those that distribute among P2P networks, hoping that some sucker forgets to remove his info and gets a slew of spam?
Some people pay extra for that. Unless you think that the guy who buys your old shirt from the thrift store and robs a 7-11 is going to be mistaken for you, of course. So don't forget to remove those monograms before making that donation to Goodwill.
I've been so looking forward to being able to buy a wider variety of high-quality non-DRM music, but this info has really dampened my enthusiasm. Once again, I'm trying to be a law-abiding citizen for the most part, but here again they're treating me like a thief right from the start.
Am I going to put the files up on bittorent? No. But do I email a couple of my friends some songs or burn them onto a CD and say "Here, check out this great band I just discovered." Yes. That's what people who love music do. Is that technically illegal? Yea, it is. But God forbid that we actually show some enthusiasm for the bands we like and discover. And I can't even fathom how many music sales that's lead to. It's a HUGE number.
But now, I have to be careful with these. If I give one to a friend as a "check out this song" thing, I have to worry what he'll do with it. It's got MY info in it. And what if he's equally enthused by the song and tries to introduce someone else to it and THEY go and do the wrong thing and spread it wide and far?
Damn it! I just knew the record companies would find some way to screw this up. And I'm sure stripping the personal info will be utterly trivial, but that's not the point, is it? I just thought for once they'd do the right thing. I was wrong.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Half the music you can download is tagged anyway by some leet speak name such as H@v0k as their calling card, "i ripped this". Now Apple does it for them.
Interesting. This creates an easy way to back up my media, share it with friends, etc. However, if I put it on a public P2P network, every spammer in the world will have my e-mail address. If someone steals my computer, I already assume that any account information, such as e-mail, is compromised. Having music on the stolen computer, with my e-mail address embedded, doesn't really add to that.
iTunes isn't available for Linux, so I've never used it. Is a current e-mail address required to maintain an iTunes account? If not then I suppose it would just be a matter of using a spam e-mail account to sign up. However, it would be a good deterrent for many people.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
Not sure how smart modern P2P programs are, but would this mean that if x users shared the same track (but with each of their names in it), the P2P programs wouldn't detect the songs as the same song as they have different hashes? Or are P2P programs more clever than this and only generate the hash on the binary portion of the file (which would make sense to account for differences in tagging information)?
automatically replace the user id field with "sjobs@mac.com" on all outgoing files?
Will you get the watermarks with the same information? I don't think so.
You just can't trust non free software, not even a little. Imagine iPod or WMP was ported to GNU/LInux. It could watermark all of your files as a background process without changing size and date information. Digital restrictions are the ultimate expression of non free software. From the very beginning, it's owners have sought to keep it's users divided and helpless. The end game is money and that requires ownership of your news and culture.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If they did go after you couldn't you sue back for invasion of privacy? they only way they will know you have a song from a friend is if it some how sent data to apple or they had a way of checking....
so my name is in my file. I don't even care if my name is impossibly well hidden in the file such that when my wife gets a copy she has my name in it. I would happily trade being able to play my music on whatever device I want and also take some responsibility for it not getting all over the internet over the current hassle-fest of today.
To me, it's no different than the VIN number on a car. You take that VIN number and it will tell you everyone that's ever owned the car. If they've got a same/similar thing for the music file, great.
To me, watermarking is the only solution fair to content owners and users, and NO I don't work for anyone involved with any of this.
One of the most effective anti-copying methods is putting a splash screen up with the original owner's name. Okay, you just register a copy under a different name. Or you find a way to strip it out or replace it. But still, the thought of your computer pantsing you is surprisingly effective.
the files might be watermarked in other ways, obviously more difficult to detect.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons you should never trust non free software.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Are the songs, in fact, DRM-free?
Yes.
Are they at a higher bitrate as advertised?
Yes.
Is there any physical restriction on what you can do with them?
No.
When you buy a DRM-free song, are you buying a "share them with teh intarweb" license?
No.
Is there a whole batch of metadata in the songs you buy from iTunes, protected or not?
Yep.
Nothing to see here, move along.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
This isn't really anything new. ALL music bought from the iTMS contains this information. I would be more surprised if they DIDN'T include it with DRM-free music.
CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
It's obvious what Apple is doing in slow increments.
1: Adopt EFI, Trusted Computing for new Mac's.
( a powerful firmware level intended for DRM schemes sitting between OS/software and hardware, that has it's own partition on the drive, can access the internet and download, do just about anything without a OS, without your knowledge for most people)
2: Enable "Just For You" in iTunes that makes suggestions based upon your entire iTunes library.
You did get "entire" right?
3: Digital watermark content.
Eventually the future batches of computers will begin to add restrictions through EFI, no watermark match? It won't play the content.
I'll pay a reasonable amount for a shareware tool that will let me turn that e-mail address into anything I want...
How many days until we see such a tool?
Richard M. Nixon!
Seriously, when you know they're tracking you, defeat the tracking mechanism through obvious means.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And that's still breaking the law. If this makes it easier to catch you, so be it. Don't break the damn law. If you want your friends to hear the song, then you have many valid choices:
(a) iTMS has a song preview, which have definitely affected by purchase decisions
(b) point them to Imeem.com or a site like it
(c) tell them to quit being cheap asses and pay the $1 for the song
(d) play the song the next time they're over
Plenty of options that don't make you a criminal.
Any copy - and I mean ANY copy - made in use on a computer counts as a copy in terms of copyright law.
. html
pop quiz: did you know that it's illegal to run a binary of a program you have on your hard-drive unless you are given permission from the copyright holder? It has been ruled that the copy from the hard-disk to system memory counts as a copy in terms of copyright law. Lame? Yup. Still legally valid? According to the federal courts, sure is.
Further reading on the topic:
http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise20
In exchange we pay a levy on recordable media.
There's no reason to speculate:
michael-chaneys-computer:~ mdchaney$ strings 1-06\ Mother.m4a
[lot's of snippage, just pulling out the obvious]
nameMichael Chaney
data
Mother
data
Pink Floyd
"aART
data
Pink Floyd
data
The Wall
gnre
data
trkn
data
disk
data
$data
2000-04-25T07:00:00Z
pgap
data
(apID
data
mdchaney@mac.com
cprt
data
Digital Remaster (P) 1994 The copyright in this sound recording is owned by Pink Floyd Music Ltd under exclusive licence to EMI Records Ltd
So, it has my name and the id that I use with iTunes (mdchaney@mac.com) along with the standard metadata that one might find in a song. If I stick it into iTunes on another machine, and bring up the info box, it says:
Purchased by: Michael Chaney
Account Name: mdchaney@mac.com
Purchase Date: 5/30/07 5:37PM
right on the summary page.
I guess I just don't get what the big deal is. How is this "hiding"?
Do you have ESP?
Isn't that what everyone said would be a noticable improvement over DRM-restricted music, and we all wanted it, and it would solve the company's problem?
When I bought the PDF of Programming Ruby, I got a PDF with my name in it. Makes sense to me!
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
If they're going to try to use this for prosecution of copyright infringement, they're in for a rude awakening: It's called "reasonable doubt."
"Someone visited my home with a thumbnail drive."
"My box got r00ted."
"I don't know how they got that song with my name on it, but I didn't send it to them. You'd better investigate."
The name and email address does nothing to PROVE a physical violation of copyright, only the identity of the purchaser, and so, if they try to take this kind of thing to a court of law, they're going to find themselves in the losing corner.
This is nothing more than FUD, and nothing less than insulting. I won't be joining iTunes any time soon.
--
Toro
The way I have always freed my tracks from DRM was to buy them on iTunes, immediately burn a CD (onto a handy CD-RW disk), then iTunes immediately recognizes the audio-CD and asks me if I want to "import" it. I have my import preferences set to MP3, and iTunes even asks me if I want to replace the existing DRM tracks with the MP3s I am ripping.
No $.30 upcharge, or DRM hassles...iTunes practically coaches you on how to do it. The CD-RW disk can be reused many times, so there isn't even a cost. Or even if you use a regular CD, it's good to have a hardcopy audio CD of the albums you buy anyway.
The whole process takes almost no time at all.
-h
So will they be able to identify my stolen ipod with 100% accuracy if all the files on it have my personal information? Sweet.
Oh, what if somebody copies that off and uploads it? Well, that'll be good actually, if we can determine the IP address we have a very simple legal case against them for stolen property, both music and hardware. And people understand stuff gets stolen, Apple isn't some giant computer where everything is YES or NO only, people understand stuff. Sometime it just takes some arm twisting to find the human.
I'm pretty sure eMusic watermarks their music too. Can anyone confirm this? I can't say it really bothers me, unless of course my iPod/computer gets stolen.
Google "private copying" and you should find what you're looking for.
If the only difference between your copy of an itunes song and your arch-nemesis's copy is name and email address, then just take your copy, change the name and email address to his and then put it up on every p2p site out there.
After all, if he is your arch-nemesis then you probably know him well enough to make a good guess as to what music they like. Even if you guess wrong, if the MAFIAA is doing enforcement, they are so sloppy they probably won't check with Apple to see if your arch-nemesis actually purchased the songs in the first place.
SOOOO, I can buy a used handgun quicker and easier than buying a Used CD?? How strange!
and the irony doesn't end there. You can buy a gun if you are under 21 but not alcohol! In other words the state is assuming you are responsible to decide who to shoot and kill but you are not responsible to decide yet how much you should drink.
Only in USA idiocy and hypocrisy mix so beautifully...
couldn't they have just generated a unique user id that referenced to the customer in some database? or was that method already patented?
Kind of reminds me a bit of Beyond Life with Timothy Leary or Perfume Tree. I might have to buy their album now...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I've got an audio editor on OS X called Fission. I opened one of my iTunes Plus files in Fission, then saved it back out (without touching anything), and it no longer has these tags. So, it seems like Fission will do what a lot of people want. Play nice...
You can find Fission here - http://www.rogueamoeba.com/
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Every time theres an apple story posted people go nuts to explain why m4a's are supperior to mp3s. They quote licensing requirements of the mp3 codec vs the m4a's open license (whatever it is). Funny now, im pretty sure you cant watermark and mp3 (comment field aside) without breaking it. I would never buy something from the apple store with this new information. Its too risky for zero reward. I can always get it off p2p after all with NO watermarking.
Personally I dont get what the difference is between sharing something with 5 friends and 500 friends. It seems to be a popular talking point here so let me get into a gray area. Suppose I go to a lan party, or run a file server for my apartment building. In both cases its signficantly under 500 users that are copying my music, if they chose. Now suppose one of these people then takes my track and uploads it somewhere world accessable. How is that my fault? Am I supposed to do thorough background checks on everyone i want to share some track with? Thats the world you want to live in????
I think to make this work, you would have to be living in a world where either you dont share any music period, or have complete trust in all your friends and people you give access to your shares. This to me is unrealistic. The problem most people have is that they think mp3s are CD's. MP3's, wma, w4a and whatever are RADIO. Do you see anyone care about people listening to the radio for free? What mp3s (by extention of playlists) allow you to do is have radio without all the annoying ads and filler tracks that you would get commercially.
There will never be a shortage of music. It's just not going to happen.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
There's no provision requiring the copier to have bought an original copy. It's perfectly legal for your friends to borrow your cds and copy them. Given that it's impossible to prove who actually made the copy, yes it is legal for you to do the copying.
Further, it's perfectly legal to make a backup copy for your own use and ask your friends to store it for you.
i wouldn't really like all my purchases (i'm talking about real things bought at supermarkets) be stamped with my full name and ssn. i'd bet you wouldn't either.
what i would be totally ok with is having some unique transaction id (like real-world serial number) embedded in every track. so that the leaked files could be tracked by apple (or third parties, after court order), but not by my teacher or your wife.
is that people will trade music like baseball cards. They do this as a way to share their culture.
It's normal human behavior.
The music industry has tried to protect their product like it's a product.
it's not really a product. it's culture.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Apple truly is an evil corporation
They gleefully force some of the labels to allow them to release DRM free music to make it look like they're actually doing something to fight the copyright cartel, but instead they've changed DRM into, arguably, the only thing even more evil than that... spyware. They might as well fingerprint you and implant a GPS tracker. What will they use this spyware for? I guarantee Apple will start selling their iTunes customers to the RIAA cartel. Just sacrificing one or two of them to keep the content gods appeased. They can afford a few losses, because iTunes and iPod has created a tidy vertical monopoly for Apple. And we all know how monopolies can be abused... looks like Apple has turned the tables on Microsoft, embrace and extend, right?
Why not just start installing rootkits? Oh wait, Sony has prior art on that one. Keep trying Apple, soon you'll be as widely despised as Sony.
And yes I'm well aware that Apple fanboys have modpoints. But you know there's truth in what I've said.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
I suggest you read the portion of the US Copyright Law that pertains to fair use.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
The reason why this is an issue is because even if you use the music completely and 100% legally, you could still have your computer compromised and have one of your music escape into the net. If a few weeks after some of my music finds its way into P2P through completely innocent means, I get an order to hand over my computer and the RIAA gets records from my ISP, I would be fairly pissed off. Apple doesn't even need to play role of the villain. It isn't like the RIAA needs Apple's permission to download songs off of a P2P network and go after the poor bastard who the music is tagged with.
I know it is Apple and we all heart Apple because their products are shinny and we can't find a $ sign into their name, but this is a serious and completely unnecessary flaw in their privacy protection. This is a wide open invitation to the RIAA to go run down innocent people who have committed no crime other then not completely securing all of their data. Even if there is deniability (the virus stoled it, not me, honest!), it won't change the fact that few sane folks have the time and money to sit down and fight that battle with the RIAA.
Apple should be admonished for this obvious and blatant flaw in protecting the privacy of their users. There is not a damn good reason why this vulnerability in privacy should be allowed. I personally have absolutely no intention of exposing myself to such risks. Sadly, I doubt the average user knows that such risks exist, much less how to defend against them.
If you buy an album in DRM-encrusted form, and it later becomes available in DRM-free form, it sucks to be you... because albums cost the same with or without DRM for new customers, but you have to pay to upgrade.
For example, "Demon Days" by Gorillaz costs $12.99 whether you get the DRM version or the iTunes Plus version. But if you buy the DRM version, the policy above states that you have to pay another 30% of the album price (about $4) to upgrade to the iTunes Plus version.
So if you feel tempted to buy an album on iTunes, thinking you might upgrade it later, don't. Wait for the DRM-free version to become available, unless you want to get charged twice.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Are you referring to the software or the user being smart?
I don't believe I've encountered either.
Just hypothetically speaking.
The very quote in the grandparent supports what I said. Note that the right to make personal copies is not limited to the owner of the original.
There's no reason to trust free software unless you either
audit entire code tree and build it yourself or get it from
a 100% trustworthy source.
Former is impractical, latter is non-existent. So free or
not, the chances of getting bent over by a publisher if he
is really out to get you are pretty much the same.
If this does not "sound right", consider what would happen
if Apple would open source the iTunes (say, under the BSD
license) and would also provide a prebuilt binary from its
own website. I think it is obvious that a vast majority of
users will be using Apple's binary.
So there's nothing that would prevent Apple from building
this binary from "slightly different" sources and adding
some "extra" functionality to it. Even if the binary file
discrepancies are discovered by the public, they can always
be blamed on differences in a build environment & such.
Any further _detailed_ analysis will be very slow and
complicated due to the amount of work required.
Free or not, it all boils down to whether the user has the
trust in a developer/publisher. People tend to assume that
free software developers are more trustworthy, but it is a
very dangerous and costly assumption.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
"What they didn't say is that all DRM-free tracks have the user's full name and account e-mail embedded in them. Is this to discourage people from throwing the tracks up on their favorite P2P platform?"
Paraphrasing from Dr. Strangelove - If you're going to build a doomsday device, you need to tell people about it for it to work.
Au contraire. Anyone who tells you that X definitely is or or that Y definitely isn't fair use, more likely than not, is wrong. Fair use is defined in 17 USC 107. In relevant part, it reads:That statute, and the common law definition of fair use that underlies it is many things, but it is in no way clear or explicit about what uses qualify.
Making copies to give to your friends? Gotta run it through the test. Selling copies on the streets of Manhattan? Gotta run it through the test. Some outcomes can be easily predicted (e.g. "hahaha, nice try. Pay up.") But most small scale, private uses are not. . . and precisely because they are small scale, private uses, as the grandparent alluded to; nobody would drag you to court to have them run through the test, so there's no precedent and therefore no way to say with any certainty whether such a use is fair or not.
Copyright maximalists have their perspective on the issue, and that's fine, but it's not the law.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
...with less evidence.
Conversation over.
Putting your email address into music that you download means that if you put it on a large pirated-music sharing network, then anybody there can see your email address. So not only can the RIAA's lawyers send you nastygrams asking for $3000, but all those Nigerian Dictators' Widows can send you mail about how you've won the Microsoft Herbal V1@Gra Lottery and if you provide them with your bank account and snailmail information they'll send you your share of the winnings, a hot stock tip, and a bottle of their latest pills.
This will cost them a less than actually bothering to sue anybody, and it's probably a *lot* more annoying
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I was wondering... Could someone grab some kind of debugging software and actually watch every file-change process iTunes makes when you download the song? I remember I could look at my RAM contents with MacsBug back in the day... I'm just wondering if iTunes would download the song, THEN add your name and email to the file. Then again, I would guess that those metadata are added on the iTunes server side, rather than embedded after the fact on your own machine... Any comments??
Has anyone actually run a packet sniffer to check on this? Can someone post some wireshark output?
What you are describing is an attempt to create artificial scarcity.
That is precisely what the "sellers" of intellectual property want you to believe. That the license/item/product you purchased is scarce that it's value should be higher than what it is really worth. There is only one problem: this approach doesn't work in a digital world with digital assets (like songs, movies, etc).
The music publishing industry (RIAA) is currently built on artificial scarcity through control of the supply chain. That works in the real world where you have inventory and "real" CD's (and real costs too). But the entire idea of "scarcity of digital assets" is nuts because things can be copied and transferred so easily in the digital world. What this means is that the actual value of what they provide is lower than what it was, say, 20 years ago. Much lower. However, they continue to try to make you think that artificial scarcity (and therefore, higher value of them) is an achievable goal.
It isn't. The digital world does not work that way. Attempts to control it will be met with route-arounds, just like they always have.
Eventually, an equilibrium will be reached. Customers will be charged what the item's value really is, and over time, society will eventually agree on what that value is. Right now, it is a one-sided discussion, with the RIAA (and its congress critters) doing all the talking -- so we go through some pain and society routes-around accordingly. Someday we won't have to route-around....but not until prices come down to reflect the real value of what we are getting for our money. Right now, we're not getting enough. So route-arounds continue...
Folks who are going to "share" files in a big way probably aren't buying them for a buck a piece in the first place, so, while there might very well be "sharing" of some of these watermarked files, it won't be anything sinister. Besides people who cared enough to buy the song in the first place are probably the industries best customers.
Of course my userid is probably about as real as my slashdot name, but still.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
It's not like there isn't an easily available way to circumvent this if you know what you are doing and want to pirate the stuff.
Just keeps honest people and stupid dishonest people honest with minimal intrusion.
When I play World of Warcraft, I walk by pressing both buttons on the mouse. This gives a lot more turning precision than you get with the keyboard. However, you can't do that on a Mighty Mouse. Its physical design can only distinguish whether you're pressing the left side or the right side - it can't recognize pressing both sides at once.
I'm sure WoW's not the only game that has a use for left+right.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Hex edit the bastard. Save file. Done.
after reading all the comments, my question is: why do they(apple) do that and why don't they tell you that they do that. i think that is a fair question.
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
Seriously, this is a huge step forward to getting rid of DRM. Moving back to the times when you bought something, you can do with it as you please (read as: play it from your iPOD, computer, home theater, car ect..). Apple's iTunes just got another customer here. So there is a watermark, my question to people is simply; And?
Now, I must say that at least embedding the original owners information in the data stream is at least closer to the issue of the actual problem. Unfortunately for the RIAA, debuggers still do their job, and the human ingenuity of the "few" that sit back to conceptualize, design, and sell this DRM cruf to the RIAA exec's is completely dwarfed by the the shear MAGNITUDE of the intelligent people who still feel ripped off by them. Honest people who just want to listen to what they legitimately purchased, and that DRM will never be the solution to this. Until the RIAA address the actual "social problem" they themselves have created, in that they are despised by all the honest an legitimate owners of "unusable" content, the RIAA will never be able to solve the file sharing problem that they actually created.
Ok, RIAA, solve the REAL problem, your perception of greed with selling a completely unusable product, and then we, yes, WE, the ones with the M-O-N-E-Y, might just start to pay attention to what you are saying! Me? Yes, I DO have money, but I spend it wisely, and not on completely "unusable" content, no matter how much money you pour into your defunct concept of DRM, or advertising of that same unusable crud. I don't file share, I don't even crack your DRM (though I have everything needed to do it should I have a mind to, or some day if I just get bored enough), but I also have VERY strong principals to live by. When you have something I want bad enough, I'll let you know. In the mean time you had better think about what I might actually want from you. Think long and hard, as that obviously does not come easy for you lately.
This has absolutly nothing to do with open source, at all.
Free softare will never do things you don't know about, so sure, Apple's underhand tagging has nothing to do with free software.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Coming soon.. iTunes Plus PLUS! Where for just $1.99 a song you can get tracks with no DRM and no identifying metadata!
Privacy issues aside, when you plug an ipod into another computer itunes prompts if you would like to transfer authorized itunes music store purchases from the ipod onto the computer. With the DRM-free music, there would be no way to differentiate between purchased music and ripped music. My roommate and I were wondering the other day how apple would make this distinction, and aside from not allowing transfering the DRM-free tracks, this is the only solution. I'm sure statistics will be collected all the same, but I do think the information has a legitimate, non-malicous reason for being stuck in the files.
If you're only using the music you paid for, for personal use (ie, copying to your own devices) no one else will ever see it.
If you're distributing music without license to all and sundry on a massive scale, you deserve to get pinged by the watermark id - it's not "invasion of privacy" if you're distributing things illegally on a massive scale.
If you don't agree with copyright, don't use copyright material...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
It's not like they've added this in today. The account information has always been there; it's been in the tags since the store started. IIRC, one of the first DRM strippers left this account info in (on purpose).
Anyways, there was a perfectly good reason for the info being there (with the DRM); you can authorize your computer for more than one account. Handy to know what account the song was bought under (if there were any authorization issues).
I chalk this up to people not realizing that the info was already there and Apple not changing the fact that the account info was in the metadata.
Apple should have embedded the purchaser's credit card number into the music, then it would very unlikely to be released into the wild! LOL.
:-|
P.S.
At least for five minutes until they figured out how to strip the data out from the music.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
Unless you are playing on Macs or exclusively playing music on iPods, there are few MP3 players (or software programs except for good old iTunes) which support AAC. Its like getting the belly chain removed, but the handcuffs and leg irons still remain.
AAC is just another closed format like ATRAC3, WMA, Liquid Audio, or Real Audio, locking the user into either buying a small subset of MP3 players (except for iPods), or forcing the user to transcode to a format that is usable.
Now, if Apple could do a decent format like FLAC or high quality MP3s (LAME's alt-preset-standard at the least, preferably alt-preset-extreme), this would be newsworthy. Otherwise, its just more iHype.
Couldn't they put the info both clearly visible in a comment-field an watermarked throughout the sound file? That way, they can announce that they store the info in the file, people will verify that it's in the comment-field. The trivial hack would simply be to strip the info from the comment-field unknowing of the watermark (that's hard to detect). Then distributing a file with a modified comment field wouldn't help, since they would also use the watermark to identify the origin.
Or am I missing something here?
sed s/foo@bar.com/xxx@yyy.com/ bar.m4a
Bummer, sed is now illegal as it can be used as a circumvention device... you did not hear this from me.
LIAR!
You must work for Microsoft.
AAC is a 100% open non-Apple audio standard codified by the ISO (all countries)
AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is one of the audio compression formats defined by the MPEG-2 standard.
Have you ever heard of MPEG 2 audio ?
MP3 (MPEG-1 Layer 3) is provably less quality than MPEG 2 AAC
That is why Apple chose it.
Apple did not ger to a market cap this week of over 103 billion dollars and thus the 52nd largest company in america by being idiots.
Even Microsoft market cap this week is under 3 times the size of apple.
Read abook sometime and quit being a liar-troll
# strings foo.mp4 | grep YourName
I wonder if it's easy to remove?
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
- Richard Stallman
We should resist terms like "stealing" when talking about music. The word has a lot of connotation from thousands of years of usage, but it has only been possible to record music for less than two centuries. (You can see RMS's article about intellectual property for more than just the sound-bite).
Another thought, from a recent blog entry I found on Digg:
Regardless of your thoughts about the value of copyright for music, using the word "stealing" to describe copying music is fundamentally dishonest.I believe they have been doing this for some time. It makes economic sense but you have to think it would be a nightmare if your player got stolen.
I can just see the scenario at the police station, "No, officer. This is SERIOUS. I could be sued for TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS. I want to file a detailed report because you have to put finding the person who took my music player at the top of your investigative priorities." Complain loud enough and long enough down that theme and you'd probably find yourself in a cell just on principle for being a pain in the ass.
To activate purchased software, I have to add a serial number...which can identify me since the software vendor knows who owns that serial. How is a "serial" of foobar@gmail.com different from a serial of 12345678 other than possibly being more discernable to casual observer?
"Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated"
Simply.... //XXX
Instead of transcoding to mp3 or ogg.
Get the position of the offending strings in the file and set the strings to a nice anonymous value like "....."
How about that? I assume there's no CRC or anything of the likes in a m4a file.
Maybe a fork from the source code of "strings" command can do it?
Not much of a C programmer, sorry, so I leave the heroics to someone more entrepreneurial.
And the info is gone or changed. What the hell is wrong with people that they need to hype this kind of stuff up all the time? There are so many posts under this topic that are totally misinformed, but it only took me 5 minutes to get an account, download a song and try to edit it in Textedit in order to see how little there is to this bullshit.
http://pax-europa.com/temp/kraftwerk.png
Nothing to see here, move along...
still they don't get it.
I want my music with NO strings attached.
the cd(rom) model is what we used to have (and the LP and cassette). there was no watermarking, no DRM, no restrictions. you bought the media and the mafiaa DID stay off your back.
now they try to sell you a 'benefit'. and SO many of you are falling for it!
initially there was DRM and they knew we didn't like it. then there's this 'new' drm-lite. no copying restrictions but now a tagging restriction (so to speak).
this is STILL not acceptable.
again, the younger market (most of who buys/listens to commercial music) will either pirate or get TOTAL drm-free music from a*mp3.com
I still see this as backwards progress. the industry is testing the waters. its STILL our job to stand our ground and say 'nice start - but keep going - and let us know when the cd(rom) style model is back again, but via downloads'.
the cd(rom) model has NO drm and NO user ID crap in it.
nothing less than that will be acceptable. it IS nice that 'they' are starting to relax some of the ultra heavy handed techniques, but they still aren't 'getting it' quite yet.
don't accept partial 'test the waters' solutions. hold out for what you KNOW you really want.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
personally, i dont care if they embed info in the track. my question is the same as yours- WHY and WHY NOT TELL?
in this time when the war cry is TRANSPARENCY it seems that Apple's super duper secrecy flies in the face of what most uber geeks are campaigning against. how hard is it to tell the customer?
is it spelled out in the EULA of itunes? or is it in the small print when you purchase the track(s)?
or is this a feature?-sorta like when your moms writes your name in your underwear when you goto overnite camp?
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
I actually have no clue what point you've been trying to make, aside from acting like a child and making an ass of yourself, but whatever it was, you could have saved yourself the embarrassment with 2 minutes on Google and probably answered whatever questions you had.
Here's the English version of the government website: Canada Copyright Act (Section 80)
This states you're free to make yourself a private copy of a copyrighted work, so long as the intent is not one of: (a) selling/renting it (b) distributing (c) communicating to the public (d) performing to the public.
In idiot-speak: you can borrow your friend's CD and make yourself a copy; your friend can borrow your copy and make himself a copy; his friend can copy that copy -- all so long as the intent isn't distribution.
If the Act itself is not clear/detailed enough for you, and this is a topic you're actually fanatically interested in (as opposed to just being a means satisfying your urge to argue about topics you don't actually care about on Slashdot), then I'd suggest using Canada411 to look up a Canadian intellectual property lawyer who can answer your questions.
Look what we got here... another mindless Mac fanatic who would defend Apple no matter what they do, ready to call people names when they don't toe the mindless Apple line. "If Apple uses it, it has to be good." Gee... I've heard that before.
Yes, AAC is yet another "standard", a patented standard that requires licensing and royalties. Unless one is in the Apple universe, AAC is rarely if ever seen, and most digital audio player makers rather license MP3 at the minimum. If you want a standard that may be actually useful, Ogg would count.
No, MP3 is not the best, but its the lowest common denominator, and works everywhere. AAC is just another alphabet soup standard in the same category as ATRAC3 further forcing divisions in what plays and what doesn't on digital audio players.
To sum up, please attempt to actually have a fact or two in your mindless pro-Mac rantings, and keep your fanboism to the ipodlounge.
This is an obvious thing, really. Apple has never maintained that they would offer "pure" mp3s, just that they would remove DRM. This seems like a perfectly acceptable compromise. It will stop the "average Joe" from sharing their music; but really won't stop the dedicated person. (There are utilities that can strip the info out, just as they could remove the DRM before.)
As for reporting? They have always said you could have one music file on five computers; it didn't specify that all five had to be "registered" to the same person. For example, I have songs from my account authorized on my main computer, my wife's main computer (which has her iTunes account as primary,) my son's main computer (again, his iTunes account is primary,) plus two spare PCs that don't have of our iTunes accounts as "primary". Am I worried that Apple will sick the RIAA on me because I have songs authorized on five computers that are registered to five different names? No, not one bit.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Any tracks I buy from the iTMS can be put on an unlimited number of iPods, whether they have DRM or not.
As a result, the question about buying for friends makes no sense.
But the entire idea of "scarcity of digital assets" is nuts because things can be copied and transferred so easily in the digital world. What this means is that the actual value of what they provide is lower than what it was, say, 20 years ago.
Artificial scarcity has been with us since the beginnings of civilization. There is always someone acting as the gatekeeper, the middleman, the person who keeps the system from working at maximum efficiency, so they can skim off the top. In an ideal world, I suppose we'd have no middlemen.
But what about the idea that while artificial scarcity has always been with us, unnatural abundance has not. Digital files are by their nature capable of being perfectly copied. Coupled with the Internet, they can be distributed globally. What other thing that can be bought or sold has these characteristics? Digital files over the Internet really are unnatural, in the sense that they go against thousands of years of human economic experience.
So what is the value of something that has the characteristics of unnatural abundance? Based on what I've seen in the university, a huge number of my peers think the value is zero, as they are unwilling to pay for music. The value of something that is so readily available is not determined by the traditional constraints of supply and demand, because in no other realm of economic activity can something be copied so perfectly and distributed so broadly and rapidly. This is not a trivial problem for individuals and companies that spend a lot of time and money to create digital goods, which is why the content industries are so freaked out about digital distribution.
Sorting this out will take time - probably a lot more time than we'd like. Also, I suspect that some of that "society will agreee on what the right value is" will involve legal, rather than economic constraints. People may agree that if left to their own devices, they will simply take digital content for free, so they will enact laws in order to prevent a tragedy of the commons situation.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Share your music => give away your email address => drown in spam. Even the RIAA weren't so vindictive... (I jest, but only just!)
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
I don't know if these are lossless or what, they only offered 2 tracks which I bought on iTS and I own the cd's of them anyway now so I'm not interested in being ripped off again for the tracks...
But anyway... if they are lossless, just burn them to CD, rip them to whatever you want, and your name magically isn't there. Wow.
If they aren't lossless, well your just wasting even more of your money. Go buy the CD, it's cheaper.
So... suppose I happen to be a fairly loud proponent of civil rights, and I also use iTunes. Suddenly the RIAA / iTunes decide I'm uncomfortable. Would you be surprised if suddenly a large number of songs with "my" watermark on it would appear on P2P networks? Heck, who cares about stolen iPods or Trojan's, I can avoid that. What I can't do shit about is if the record industry decides to leak something with my watermark in order to nail me in court. The only possible way for me to prevent that is to never ever purchase a song through an on-line service that uses watermarking, or move to a country where such watermarks are not recognised by law. Basically, what we need is a legal precedent or law making clear very damn quickly that this sort of thing will not be acceptable as evidence in court.
The Four Record Labels that form the RIAA DO reserve the right to make money off the music it owns, despite how evil it is. One of them... EMI decided to release music that's DRM-free and you guys deride them for adding a watermark so that should EMI find a file that is being pirated from this, they can track down the original person who ordered it? The fair use of users is not being violated by watermarking, and if you want to give a sample to a small group of friends, you ought to copy and convert to MP3, which makes it lossy but erases the watermark, much like recording it off the radio. You want to advertise cool music from your favorite band, even if it is RIAA-approved fluff. I see no problem with this, but if you do, you are free to listen to independents... I do, and I shall consider EMI's music as well.