San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital civil liberties group, said this week that, after examining information embedded on the DRM-free tracks sold on Apple's new iTunes Plus -- first reported on by Ars Technica and TUAW, which found them to include user names and e-mail addresses -- it found significant differences in the sizes of the files.

Some have speculated that the inclusion of such data as a user's name and e-mail address -- which were also present on DRM-encoded songs -- could allow Apple to track any uploads to illicit file-sharing services back to the original owner of the file.

The EFF speculated that the as yet unidentified extra data in the DRM-free song files -- aside from the names and e-mails -- could mean 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."

Related Links:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005282.php

http://tinyurl.com/2bk9uq (ArsTechnica)

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/05/30/tuaw-tip-dont-torrent-that-song