Slashdot Mirror
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?'"
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!
First, why would you have to prove that you did not put them there? Your name on them is not proof that you did, and if you can show that a device that may have had the files was stolen you'll walk unscathed from even a civil suit.
This whole thing seems a bit weird to me. Apple's license forbids them from sending the data back to headquarters for analysis to catch casual pirates. They've been including this data in all the files they've sent for a long time. This is in the mp4 format so nothing stops a freeware program from erasing or changing them. Heck I can grab your e-mail address from a dozen places now and add it to mp4 files on P2P networks. That doesn't prove you put them there.
So, it is 100 times easier to grab these files from P2P for purposes of piracy than it is to steal a player or get them some other way. Who is planning on uploading files they have purchased anyway? That's just dumb.
Your first two paragraphs are pretty much wrong. Some people seem to think giving their songs to friends is fair use, but that is not the case and the media industry has historically fought against even the existance of blank recording media and recorders. Selling used CD comes under fire often as well. Garth Brooks had some publicity a while back trying to stop it. There was some story recently about some state trying to regulate it even.
All that's left are the uni-button skating rinks on their laptops, but I can't imagine that they're going to stay that way much longer. Besides, those can use gestures for scrolling and what not.
No. You can't.
o n
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossy_data_compressi
If you remove those two atoms ('name' and 'user'), the file will play just fine. This is effectively Apple using a pin lock on the front door rather than a deadbolt. "Keeps the honest people honest" and all that.
Even better, they've been doing exactly this ever since the iTunes Music Store opened. The HYMN Project was specifically designed to leave your user information in the file. The idea was that if you are stripping the crypto for legitimate purposes (backups, interoperability, etc.), you wouldn't mind having your name attached to the decrypted files.
This is the very definition of not-news. It's like that guy on Full Disclosure earlier this month who was going on about how Macs clamp the output of 'ps -aux' to the terminal width and how this prevents users from seeing the full process name. The 'w' flag was probably added before that clown was born.
I agree. Who cares?
The only people this affects are those who use the file in an illicit manner (distributing it on P2P). It's not like DRM where it punishes legit users significantly, often forcing them to piracy just for the sake of compatibility.
Oh, and it's nothing new. The old DRMed files had it too. In fact, back in the days of PyMusique and whatever that program was that stripped Apple DRM after the fact (as opposed to PyMusique not applying it in the first place), neither program did anything about this identification data because unlike the DRM, there was no legit reason to remove it. It's always been there, albeit in many cases encrypted.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
4 point at the bottom? The headline is a lie -- there's nothing "hidden" about this. The summary info in iTunes displays the account info for each file.
Truth is, somebody decided long ago that they'd use this sort of nonsense to criticize what's really an industry-changing development. I don't know how you possibly see it as underhanded. The file has some informational tags... duh.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
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.
Note that this is `widely supported' as in 'supported by a lot of platforms' not 'supported by a lot of systems.' To my knowledge, there is no OpenFirmware implementation for x86. OpenBIOS has started, but not finished. Since they went to Intel to get a complete solution (motherboard, chipset, and CPU), writing their own firmware would have been somewhat counterproductive.
That said, I'll take OpenFirmware over EFI any day of the week.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News