I kind of assume this with any digital media. Games, music, ebooks, stock videos, whatever - embedding a tiny unique ID is very easy and can allow publishers to track down leakers/pirates.

Honestly, even though as a consumer I don’t like it, I don’t mind it that much. Doesn’t seem right to take the extreme position of “publishers should not be allowed to have ANY way of finding out who is leaking things”. There needs to be a balance.

Online phone-home DRM is a huge fuck no, but a benign little piece of metadata that doesn’t interact with anything and can’t be used to spy on me? Whatever, I can accept it.

Doesn’t seem right to take the extreme position of “publishers should not be allowed to have ANY way of finding out who is leaking things”.

That’s a fun opinion but have you considered that property is theft and intellectual property is bullshit

Without IP your favourite books, movies, TV shows, music and video games would not exist.

the artists still exist and would continue to make art even if we abolished the systems of exploitation we apply to that art.

frankly, art would instantly become far better without capitalism weighing it down