Software licenses and the music industry have their “nose in your business.” Almost everything else is covered under “first sale doctrine.” That basically mean “I bought it. It’s mine to do with as I please.” That’s why there are no Blockbusters for music.

Software is mixed bag, a mishmash of court rulings, as to whether you own a copy and are free to do with it as you please. You might as well flip a coin.

The fact that many licenses allow that, and what Apple told me today on the phone, they hold that true too. The law does not say otherwise anyway. And besides, it would be stupidly stupid to buy the same album from iTunes 2 or 3 or 4 times for all family members. Just stupid. I prefer to continue doing what we currently do if that’s the case: buy CDs and rip them.

HOW do you know that? JBQ uses a Mac for iTunes and I use a PC. Apple’s iTunes can VERY easily figure out that the username on the AAC is not the same as the iTunes on the current computer. Even if we are on the same family, our iTunes installations and iPods are different.

I see no guarantees whatsoever that Apple don’t give this bit of information to RIAA and that RIAA won’t file a lawsuit.

You are putting too much faith to Apple that they will figure out who is who and let it be. I don’t.

>In a week or two you’ll see tools to expunge any private data

I am sorry, but I don’t want to use such tools. Neither JBQ wants to. I believe in out of the box solutions and that’s what iTunes is. If I must use (usually) buggy shareware, well, I better purchase the CDs then and do the ripping myself.

Then maybe Apple might want to have a word with you. I’m sure it’s trivial to delete any information you don’t want. In a week or two you’ll see tools to expunge any private data.

Are you afraid of being taken to court or afraid of people finding out what music you listen to ?

If you’re that paranoid, why not have an offline computer play your music ? Why not strip the data out yourself ? I’m sure you or JBQ could whip something up. It is not a violation of the DMCA because it isn’t DRM, you are free to do so.

I encode my CDs in Monkey’s Audio. I can play it in windows, linux or beos or I could use flac to encode as well. We have a good pawn shop in town where CDs around 2 or 3 dollars when purchased one at a time, but 1 dollar when you get (around)5.

You have to worry about putting them up on pirate bay or on a file sharing program, and that’s it.

The first tech support guy, Paul, did not even know the difference between DRM and DRM-free. Then, after almost an hour of wating, Mike comes to the phone and says that they won’t sue. I mentioned RIAA but he said something to the effect of “no, you won’t get sued, members of the same family should be able to share music”.

My problem is, how will they know that my husband and I are in the same family, especially because we don’t share the same surname or have US marriage papers? He was not able to answer that.

You know what? Screw that. I am calling Apple.

On top of that, you can copy and burn the files without restriction.

While having personal information tagged in files is far from ideal, I think everyone believes it’s superior to having actual DRM present in the files.