On boingboing.net yesterday, David Pescovitz offered the story of his writer friend, Erik Davis, who returned from Burning Man this year to find himself in boiling water with Beirut's reps for being traced back to the leaking of the band's upcoming The Flying Cup Club on the Internet. Turns out Davis didn't actually do the leaking, but he did sell his CD to a used record shop well in advance of the album's October 9 release date; the disc, of course, had been encoded with a digital watermark that instantly tips off labels who, surprise surprise, also have accounts on Oink and other networks and can easily track down any files that contain those watermarks.
It seems Davis eventually made good with Beirut's label rep, Ben Goldberg, but in his post he seems a bit indignant that he should have been targeted and rebuked by Goldberg in the first place. I have a friend who works at a well-known indie label, and one of his duties is calling up writers who've leaked watermarked CDs onto Oink to bitch them out; so maybe not enough to put the fear of God into you, but certainly makes you rethink how much you value your free flow of promos. As a writer who receives watermarked CDs and, yes, occasionally benefits from people who have leaked music onto the Internet, I gotta say that I've never felt any compulsion to leak albums onto the net, though I guess these things do go translate to cred coinage in certain circles. I feel a little sympathy for Erik, but think he probably coulda waited at least until the record came out to sell it and avoid this whole mess.
Erik Davis on watermarked promotional CDs [boingboing.net]
My Data Crime: The Ticking Time Bomb of the Watermarked Advance CD [techgnosis.com]