Scrobbling the Fifth

(From Stringbot's Flickr, Creative Commons)
Call it betrayal by scrobbling. I was shocked to read this evening that last.fm (one of my favorite music resources on the web) may have given over member profile information to the RIAA to help identify individual users with pirated music. According to TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld, last.fm, which has been acquired by CBS, was approached by the RIAA after hundreds of thousands of its users began scrobbling (that's listening and tagging) pirated tracks from the leaked U2 album. Last.fm allegedly turned over thousands of its users' profile information to authorities who plan to use that information to track down fans listening to the tracks. It sounds like an invasion of privacy to me, but it is not legally so. Here's what I found while perusing the site's Terms of Use:

Except as otherwise described in our Privacy Policy or other agreement on the Website at which you provide Your Upload Information, Your Upload Information will be treated as non-confidential and non-proprietary and we will not be liable for any use or disclosure to anyone, including but not limited to claimed intellectual property owners.

DownloadSquad's Jay Hathaway quickly struck down the accusations. Although he did confirm that last.fm reserves its right to hand over such information, no data was actually handed over to authorities in this case. In a forum post written soon after the TechCrunch post was published, last.fm site admins said, "Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we'd never personally identify our users to a third party - that goes against everything we stand for. As far as I'm concerned Techcrunch have made this whole story up."

Even though I believe Jay Hathaway has put this particular flare-up to bed, the case brings up some interesting questions about last.fm and its users' rights. Being a subsidiary of CBS, itself a company that has faced issues with pirated intellectual property in the past, last.fm may one day be obliged to hand over user information. And although I doubt that it would result in penalties for the average scrobbler, I am of the opinion that such a move would violate my personal rights. As an avid user of the site (see my my last.fm profile), I am disconcerted and disappointed by this news.

Any thoughts?