San Francisco - Universal Music Group will include watermarks that can be used to track the potential spread of its new digital rights management-free songs on file-sharing networks, Wired.com reported. The label last week announced a trial whereby it will sell songs free of DRM from a number of retailers. It's still unclear whether the watermark will be unique to each individual purchase, meaning that Universal would know if a particular consumer's purchased track was uploaded to a file-sharing network.

Update: Wired.com reported on Aug. 15 that the DRM-free Universal downloads will not in fact carry watermarks that can uniquely identify individual consumers. Rather, they could potentially be used to generally track when songs are uploaded to file-sharing networks.

Related Links:
http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/08/universals-open.html

http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/08/universals-mp-1.html

http://new.umusic.com/News.aspx?NewsId=539