Apple's Fairplay-Not So Fair

When Apple announced that they would be selling DRM-free music on the iTune store, everyone thought that this would herald a new thinking on DRM. It turns out that their proprietary anti-piracy measures are even worse. Apple uses a technology known as Fairplay to limit what people can do with downloads. Fairplay can be circumvented by burning tracks to a CD and then converting them to another format. It was found that Fairplay is embedded within them the full name and account information, including e-mail address, of who bought them. It is only a matter of time before a utility program was produced which could strip out the identifying information. Apple needed to explain why the data was present.