Will ‘DRM-free’ tracks mean ‘DRM-free’ tracks?

One month ago, while mussing on Apple’s Mr. Steve Jobs’ ‘Thoughts on Music’, I came up with a post elsewhere, that summarized my take on that DRM aren’t inherently evil…

In fact the bottom line of the post was that DRM do not need to restrict users choices in any way, and still serve a purpose to copyright holders. This might not be the best of the worlds for media players manufacturers, but could be an answer to some of the popular claims that are being heard these days.

I offered the idea that DRM could be used just to attribute license ownership from media files purchased over the Internet such as iTunes’ store ones, to the people actually buying them.

Hopefully a large number of such people would find that a rather dissuasive factor to weigh when thinking on sharing those files through p2p services and the like… knowing that their full name would be embedded in the file being illegally shared. Not that most of that people would probably be inclined to that in the first place…

Today EMI and Apple held a joint press conference in London in which they took a step forward in the music market revolution that Apple started a couple of years ago.

Apparently, EMI will be selling DRM-free tracks from iTunes Store at a premium.

From Apple’s press release:

With DRM-free music from the EMI catalog, iTunes customers will have the ability to download tracks from their favorite EMI artists without any usage restrictions that limit the types of devices or number of computers that purchased songs can be played on. DRM-free songs purchased from the iTunes Store will be encoded in AAC at 256 kbps, twice the current bit rate of 128 kbps, and will play on all iPods, Mac® or Windows computers, Apple TVs and soon iPhones, as well as many other digital music players.

I’m kind of curious on whether this ‘DRM-free’ will truly mean ‘DRM-free’, or whether it will just mean as the release states that those premium tracks will be able to be played on any kind of average digital player, in addition to Apple’s superb ones.

I’m betting on that those ACC premium tracks will all be tied to their purchasers…

Talk about blowing your own horn…

All the best, TFS

UPDATE: Find here the slides from today’s presentation.