Apple’s Steve Jobs wrote an open letter almost 2 years ago where he advocated the death of DRM. As he put it, (albeit in a much longer form) the 4 major music companies (Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI) own 70 percent of the worlds music, yet only require the 10 percent sold online to be locked with DRM. (compared with the other 90 percent sold on CDs) Jobs’s open letter was taken by many to be a huge show of support for fair use rights. While his letter did make a lot of good points, and did eventually lead to removal of DRM from the entire iTunes catalog, it was more about good business than fair use. Apple spent a lot of money developing their FairPlay DRM system, and even more protecting it from attacks that would seek to undo it’s encryption scheme. During that time the music industry was distributing DRM-free music on CDs, so why should Apple have to shell out all this money to keep FairPlay afloat?  Apple is touting the advent of DRM-free music for its entire catalog in the form of iTunes plus, only there’s one thing they’re not telling you. While the songs aren’t encrypted and can be moved to any device you choose, they can still be traced back to their original owner. This is because Apple watermarks each file with the name and e-mail address of the purchaser. For most of us, this doesn’t seem like a big deal. If you don’t share your music, why should you be worried? Well, suppose a thief steals your iPod, copies the tracks and uploads them to a peer to peer network. Are you liable? Some people are understandably concerned about this possibility.  If you’re one of those concerned individuals, there are a couple of ways to scrub the personally identifiable information from your files.  One way may be the Hymn/JHymn project software.  Hynm has been around for a while and works to liberate the decrypted music from iTunes and convert it to a DRM-free file with no loss in sound quality.  It has historically preserved the personal information, but even in 2005 one of the maintainers admitted this feature might change if Apple were to use the information against its customers.  Another way is to resave the files without re-encoding them with software such as Amoeba’s Fission audio editing software.  As explained on MacWorld, Fission is only accidentally capable of removing the identifiers because of it’s rigid adherence to standards.  I can’t imagine the RIAA will be able to resist prosecuting people whose iTunes files are discovered on P2P sites.  While it’s unclear whether or not this will hold up in court, why risk it.  Personally, it shouldn’t be a huge deal.  I’ve only purchased a small handful of albums and tracks from iTunes and I don’t share my music.  (besides which, if somebody tries to steal my ipod they’d better be able to run like the wind…)  However, if the RIAA starts actively pursuing iTunes customers, I might just have to reconsider my options.