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?'"

Comments

Re:the acid test

[Threni]

> Unless you're actually planning to break the law by sharing the songs,

Or buying them for a friend, or have had your PC/MP3 player stolen, or sold the songs on after you bought them, or had your PC/Wireless router hacked and files stolen...yeah, apart from that you should be ok.

Re:The advantage then of buying real CD's

[M. Baranczak]

A smart P2P client should be able to strip out the identifying tags automatically. Not that I would ever advocate copyright infringement, just hypothetically speaking.

Re:American laws do not apply outside the US

[Fizzl]

Atleast in Finland we pay outrageous prices for blank media so that we could legaly make copies of music.
Funny enough, I think it's still illegal to copy music. It's a weird situation. But Teosto and Gramex are the evil brothers of copyright.
Those are the local RIAA. I'm member of both and it's not even easy to resign from them. I tried once but was told to mail in my resign letter in certain time frame when they "process such requests". Surprisinlgy enough, I never remembered to do it at that certain time. I think they have a ton of guys like me who have like one registered demo tape from their teens. Atleast they can boast to have beeelliyons of members whose intellectual property they are protecting.
Oh yeah. If I register a song with them, I'm not allowed to even publish it on my web page anymore without paying royalties. Royalties which should be paid to me ofcourse. In reality all the small guys pennies will go to a common pool which will be divided to the artists "fairly" based on other visibility. eg. The big artists take the 2 cents which would be rightfully mine!

Re:The advantage then of buying real CD's

[hweimer]

Do you know if giving music, not fixed in a tangible medium (like a CD), is legal? These tracks are licensed, not sold. So are you just complaining that Apple's actions make it less convenient for you to perform a possibly illegal act?

In countries like Germany this is perfectly legal (unless you break a copy protection scheme). There, Apple's behavior might even be a violation of privacy laws.