OMG! Apple’z DRM-free music spies on me!

If you pay 99p instead of 79p for your EMI download from iTunes, you get something special.

You get the music in double the quality - 256k instead of 128k. The music apparently sounds cleaner and more vibrant.

You also get the music without any Digital Rights Management. So you can copy it, move it around, play it on one of those nice new thin Sony Walkman nano-a-likes, etc.

And, as the Electronic Freedom Foundation have discovered, you also get those tracks embedded with your name, your email address, and possibly many other things too.

This, to me, makes perfect sense. They’ve stripped the DRM so that you can, for example, burn the tracks onto CD, or move them to your other player, play them on your mobile phone - a wealth of possibilities denied to us with DRM-protected files. However, they’ve not stripped the DRM to allow people to stick them on the internet for everyone to download or to share around the office; hence the embedded user information.

ArsTechnica appears to be fuming about this.

I don’t understand why.

• apple
• music
• copyright