RipDigital's been getting some play in the blogosphere today, thanks to a Wired News article. They exist to serve the busy music-lover with more CDs than time by offering to rip your collection to MP3. It's some of their less-publicized services that interest me.
Like the part where they embed some kind of personally unique information in their MP3 files:
Does RipDigital respect copyright protection? Yes. RipDigital is committed to copyright protection and based upon counsel from a major law firm has established strict operational protocols for the service: the most important of which is that RipDigital converts every single CD provided by our customers and does not keep a backup copy of any music files. We also require that customers take responsibility for ownership of their CDs and agree not to upload their music on to file sharing services. Finally we include a unique identifying mark with each file to encourage responsible use of digital music.I guess they heard that people like encouragement. Two interesting things: first, is there a customer on earth who would ask for this "encouragement?" I'm paying you to rip my CDs, not police my hard drive. Second, what happens when, despite my best efforts, my media is no longer under my control. Say I make a playlist of my legally-owned, RipDigital-ripped music for my girlfriend. Say my wife finds out about said girlfriend and divorces me, taking half of everything. Said girlfirend was only in it for the fly bling-bling lifestyle and dumps my broke ass, but takes the playlist (and the MP3s) with her on her iPod. If Lola (the now ex-girlfriend) shares these tracks on KaZaA, is the RIAA going to track me down as a consequence? Will I have to go to the trouble of hiring a lawyer to defend myself?
