4 ms·

OCRing individual screenshots is not "easy to copy." Most people who pirate (books, software, music, whatever) won't bother to go to such extreme lengths. Stuf

OCRing individual screenshots is not "easy to copy." Most people who pirate (books, software, music, whatever) won't bother to go to such extreme lengths. Stuff like this obviously doesn't make piracy impossible, but it does substantially reduce it.

LinAGKar 4y ago
So it will make stripping the DRM for personal use (and, I suppose, sharing with friends) infeasible, while doing little to prevent it from showing up at piracy sites.
- PhasmaFelis 4y ago
  Which will be enough to discourage a lot of pirates. Certainly most of the potential pirates who could conceivably be converted to buyers. Gabe Newell had the right idea when he said that you don't have to make piracy impossible, you just have to make purchasing easier than pirating. The kind of people who will jump through endless hoops, tolerate shoddy rips, etc. just to get something for free were never going to be your customers anyway.
  - LinAGKar 4y ago
    That would make me more likely to pirate it. Currently I've been able to buy the books and strip the DRM
  - Arch-TK 4y ago
    It's all great to quote Gabe Newell but you are completely misunderstanding his point. The point is that the steam platform makes it so easy to buy and play games that pirating them is comparatively risky (chance of malware, lack of updates) and not worth it, not that he has made games difficult enough to pirate that his platform seems favorable. Games on steam have no default DRM like ebooks on the amazon store, for the kinds of games I play, most of them can be copied from steam and played without the interference of DRM. For a lot of the ones which do have some kind of DRM or steam reliance, it is actually trivial to use a fake steam library to bypass this form of "DRM". All in all, the amount of actual DRM on steam is limited only to AAA titles. I pirate e-books not because I can't afford to buy them, but because I can't find a DRM free copy so I just buy the hard copy and pirate a digital version. The reality is, if there were more e-book stores which were like steam, I would probably use them, because hopefully I would have access to the content I bought to display it on any device I want and archive it for the future.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    > Which will be enough to discourage a lot of pirates. Sounds more like it would turn people who would remove the DRM of the stuff they bought into people who visit pirate sites.
jchw 4y ago
Compared to cracking DRM schemes, which is what people were doing anyways, it is relatively simple...
xg15 4y ago
I mean, you can archieve that with a smartphone and open source OCR software. If you just care about reading and not searching, you can even leave out the OCR step and just store the photos. That sounds pretty easy to me.
Brybry 4y ago
For a long time OCR of books/pdfs/ebooks was the standard in the ebook piracy scene. Pirated ebooks had version numbers for OCR/quality corrections. The same distribution channels are even still running since before things like Amazon's mobi format (and Calibre) were created. I don't think this DRM change will substantially reduce piracy. Actions like the takedown of Z-Library's domains probably had a much greater effect. One person automating downloading of Amazon Unlimited's new releases and OCRing them would be way easier than the old dead tree OCR setups.

LinAGKar 4y ago

So it will make stripping the DRM for personal use (and, I suppose, sharing with friends) infeasible, while doing little to prevent it from showing up at piracy sites.

PhasmaFelis 4y ago
Which will be enough to discourage a lot of pirates. Certainly most of the potential pirates who could conceivably be converted to buyers. Gabe Newell had the right idea when he said that you don't have to make piracy impossible, you just have to make purchasing easier than pirating. The kind of people who will jump through endless hoops, tolerate shoddy rips, etc. just to get something for free were never going to be your customers anyway.
- LinAGKar 4y ago
  That would make me more likely to pirate it. Currently I've been able to buy the books and strip the DRM
- Arch-TK 4y ago
  It's all great to quote Gabe Newell but you are completely misunderstanding his point. The point is that the steam platform makes it so easy to buy and play games that pirating them is comparatively risky (chance of malware, lack of updates) and not worth it, not that he has made games difficult enough to pirate that his platform seems favorable. Games on steam have no default DRM like ebooks on the amazon store, for the kinds of games I play, most of them can be copied from steam and played without the interference of DRM. For a lot of the ones which do have some kind of DRM or steam reliance, it is actually trivial to use a fake steam library to bypass this form of "DRM". All in all, the amount of actual DRM on steam is limited only to AAA titles. I pirate e-books not because I can't afford to buy them, but because I can't find a DRM free copy so I just buy the hard copy and pirate a digital version. The reality is, if there were more e-book stores which were like steam, I would probably use them, because hopefully I would have access to the content I bought to display it on any device I want and archive it for the future.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > Which will be enough to discourage a lot of pirates. Sounds more like it would turn people who would remove the DRM of the stuff they bought into people who visit pirate sites.

jchw 4y ago

Compared to cracking DRM schemes, which is what people were doing anyways, it is relatively simple...

xg15 4y ago

I mean, you can archieve that with a smartphone and open source OCR software. If you just care about reading and not searching, you can even leave out the OCR step and just store the photos. That sounds pretty easy to me.

Brybry 4y ago

For a long time OCR of books/pdfs/ebooks was the standard in the ebook piracy scene. Pirated ebooks had version numbers for OCR/quality corrections. The same distribution channels are even still running since before things like Amazon's mobi format (and Calibre) were created. I don't think this DRM change will substantially reduce piracy. Actions like the takedown of Z-Library's domains probably had a much greater effect. One person automating downloading of Amazon Unlimited's new releases and OCRing them would be way easier than the old dead tree OCR setups.