Apple criticized for embedding names, e-mails in songs

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Wow, you people really need to adjust your tinfoil hats

Apple isn't including your email address so people can get your home address and steal your stuff. Apple isn't including your email address so you can be added to a porn site's spam list. Apple is including your email address in the DRM-Free song because if you were to share the music file as a concession to the music industry. Apple wants to make the DRM experiment work, for the simple reason that DRM sucks.

The DRM watermark isn't there because Apple wants you to have your email address stolen. It's there because the RIAA wants to know who's sharing music on Gnutella and BitTorrent.

If Apple could have it their way, your email address wouldn't be there. Also, even if your email address was not in cleartext, someone would figure out the security on the file metadata and we'd be hearing about this 6 months from now.

Microsoft will do the same thing, encrypted or not. Yahoo will do the same thing, encrypted or not. Napster will do the same thing, encrypted or not. It's pretty much inevitable.

Chances are, if your iPod gets stolen, it'll be sold on Craigslist or eBay, either untouched or clean-formatted, since most common thieves don't know how to grab the music off of the hard drive before iTunes deletes it. Most end users also don't know how to do this. And of the few in each group that do, it's highly unlikely that either will take the time to steal your name and email address out of your unprotected iTMS downloaded songs.

So it's not shame on Apple, as Jeff Hayes stated. (BTW Jeff, it's not a good idea to share your first and last name on the internet, since there's only a finite number of Jeff Hayes's in the United States. WTG!) This would be a more of a shame on you, RIAA.

But that's just my 2?, and when Zune Store, Napster, Yahoo Music, and the others get theirs DRM-free files, I'll be there to post this same statement.

Posted by: nix_hed   Posted on: 06/05/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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