Can purchased digital music be traced back?

[Dogbert69]

Hi, all. I haven't found anything addressing this yet so I figured I'd ask. I'm looking to start creating music torrents. Does anyone know if digital stores like 7digital have any way of putting a unique identifier in their files? Like is there any way for them to trace torrented files back to the account that made the purchase?

[shibazmalic]

considering 7digital is DRM-Free I think it'd be fine

[Moe]

It is certainly possible. Many stores do embed purchaser information. I can't speak for 7digital. You can use something like a hex editor to look for identifying strings in the file.

[dueda]

If it's there, it's probably encrypted. Info won't be seen explicitly as text on an editor, gotta understand (or reverse engineer) the file format.

[RodneyYouPlonker]

I would have thought so yes, I don't think in this day and age they would allow you to purchase some music and then allow you to simply just go and upload it as a torrent without some kind of protection to prevent people commiting piracy with their product.  This is something that really I'm sure they've done their research into with experts so that if something happens and somebody can manage to share their work and just hand it out then I'm sure there's ways of tracing back the source of where it came from.  This is why you should be careful really and do your own rips of things.  Start from scratch and get the disc and copy that, don't waste your time trying to share something out that has been designed in a certain way like this.  If they trace it back to you then you could be in real trouble and it wouldn't be nice at all.