iTunes Plus not so DRM-free after all

The launch of DRM-free music tracks on iTunes has been overshadowed by the discovery that they contain data about who bought them.

The DRM-free tracks officially went on sale on May 30th under the new "iTunes Plus" banner. DRM-free versions are available as 256Kbps AAC and cost USD $1.29 per song. Users can also upgrade previously-purchased songs to DRM-free versions, if available, for USD $0.30 apiece.

Shortly after the iTunes Plus service went live, reports surfaced asserting that the tracks had been embedded with the purchasers' full name and the e-mail addresses associated with their iTunes accounts.

The discovery of the personal information, however, has sparked a controversy.

According to BBC some fear this data could be used to identify the owner of the tracks if they turn up on p2p sites. At this point it is not yet clear how deeply the user data is buried in the track or how easy it is to remove. But it is just a matter of time until hackers take care of that.

"We should be clear on one thing: Just because EMI and Apple - and more to come - have removed DRM from their files does not mean those files can be shared," James McQuivey, a Forrester Research analyst, told MacNewsWorld.

Electronic Frontier Foundation investigated a bit further. As it turns out, the DRM-free AAC files from iTunes contain more than just names and e-mail addresses:

We've found that there isn't a watermark in the compressed audio signal itself, but there are surprisingly huge differences in the encoded files. Much bigger differences than just different tags, or even different signed/encrypted tags.

We compared two DRM-free copies of the track Daftendirekt by Daft Punk. When decoded to PCM/WAV data, both copies produced an identical audio signal. So there is no audio watermark. But one of the .m4a files is almost 360K larger than the other!

EFF also reports that it could be that large amounts of iTunes library data are present in each file. It's also possible that Apple has found a way to watermark the AAC encoding itself.

FriskyRadio founder Faisal Sultan has said it best: "Either give us true DRM-Free tracks with no strings or don’t fucking bother".

Apple has yet to comment on what it plans to do with the information embedded in the music files.