Apple: turning into law enforcement, one step at a time

When Apple announced that it was going to sell DRM-free music, most people thought that that would be a good thing for the iPod-addicted masses. DRM restricts consumers options and freedoms, and is entirely unwanted on their end. Even though Apple was raising the cost 30 cents (for an increase in quality as well, not just for taking away a "feature" that customers didn't want in the first place), the announcement was greeted with general acclaim by those who hoped that Apple was moving away from the privacy-invasive techniques of Big Media.

The devil, of course, is in the details. Apple has traded in DRM on its EMI tracks for something even more insidious: a water mark that embeds the name and email address of the user that purchased it in the file, allowing Apple (or anyone else) to identify who the file was originally sold to. Of course, this can be easily circumvented by converting the file to mp3, overwritting the name and email (steve@mac.com, for a good laugh), etc. However, the fact remains that the vast majority of users either do not know, do not care, or do not care to figure out how to eliminate this data from their files. See for yourself:

dannyc@sf:~/Desktop/Music From Laptop/DRM (iTunes)$ strings 01\ Proper\ Education\ \(Radio\ Edit\).m4p | grep "name"
nameDaniel Colligan
name
dannyc@sf:~/Desktop/Music From Laptop/DRM (iTunes)$ strings 01\ Proper\ Education\ \(Radio\ Edit\).m4p | grep ".com"
dannycolligan@gmail.com
"com.
dannyc@sf:~/Desktop/Music From Laptop/DRM (iTunes)$

Apple's actions beg the question, why are they doing this? What possible benefit could Apple reap from putting identifying information in its files? Since they have the iTunes player on virtually every consumer desktop these days, is it so improbable that the next iTunes upgrade will include a spy that informs Apple whenever you have files that do not belong to you and/or deletes them and/or informs someone else (say, those labels that Mr. Jobs has been cozying up to lately)? Ars Technica points out that iTunes already feeds data back to Apple so that the iTunes client can recommend tracks that you might like. Put the dail-home feature with the identifying info feature, however, and you have a recipe for a copyright infringement detector. Just what we all need: now in addition to Big Media watching our every transmission over the network, Apple will be the overlord of our hard drive.

If it's not obvious to you already, avoid using iTunes for your own sake.