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With great power comes great responsibility, and apparently with DRM-free music comes files embedded with identifying information. Such is the situation with Apple's new DRM-free music: songs sold without DRM still have a user's full name and account e-mail embedded in them, which means that dropping that new DRM-free song on your favorite P2P network could come back to bite you.
Ken Fisher and others at
arstechnica.com started examining the files this morning and noticed their names and e-mail addresses in the files, and they found
corroboration of the find at TUAW, as well.
But there's more to the story: Apple embeds your account information in all songs sold on the store, not just DRM-free songs. Previously it wasn't much of a big deal, since no one could imagine users sharing encrypted, DRMed content. But now that DRM-free music from Apple is on the loose, the hidden data is more significant since
it could theoretically be used to trace shared tunes back to the original owner.
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