6 ms·

New DRM Changes Text of eBooks to Catch Pirates

41 points by Lightning 13y ago

beagle3 13y ago
That's not DRM. If anything, that's a textual version of "digital watermarking" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_watermarking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_watermarking It's old news - it's been done to find internal document leakers for years - I believe even in typewriter days. Thing is, it only works on a very small scale, when the people under surveillance are unaware, and are unwilling to collaborate. When these assumptions don't hold, it is trivial to generate a version which has all the information yet does not correspond to any original watermarking (or worse, replicates some watermark that is not part of the set used to generate the version)
- davorak 13y ago
  > It's old news - it's been done to find internal document leakers for years - I believe even in typewriter days. I knew it was an old technique but I had not thought about it being that old. If you have any idea of where you heard this I would be interesting in knowing.
  - shardling 13y ago
    I first read about it in an old Tom Clancy novel. A short bit of googling led me to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap So the technique was well known by 1987, which certainly qualifies as typewriter days. Apparently it was used in fiction as early as 1972.
mathrawka 13y ago
I have worked with e-book authors in creating systems to mitigate piracy of their books. Even if you know who gave out the book that the pirates were able to get, it doesn't make them automatically guilty. In one case, the brother of a customer was the culprit... the author was actually surprised because from the looks of the evidence, it was someone who he trusted that "leaked" the book. Sure, the person could have lied and blamed his brother, but the author trusted him enough to believe the story and accepted the apology from the brother. Anything involving DRM starts to make things get hairy. I can understand the want of the authors to protect their contents that they worked hard on producing. But I also understand how the real customers don't like DRM. In the end, DRM was ditched and a subscription model was created. Both the author and the users were happy with that resolution.
- kefs 13y ago
  Exactly this. Just because a copy of an ebook I purchased is now floating around the internet, does not, a pirate, make me.
Rangi42 13y ago
I had hoped from the headline that they would be doing something subtle, like replacing some capital "A"s with Greek "Alpha"s, or replacing a single-character "ü" with separate "u" and "combining umlaut". But visible changes that mess with, not just the text formatting, but the actual words of the text, are unacceptable.
- gizmo686 13y ago
  Invisible changes are trivial for a pirate to undo (once they know what is going on). With visible changes, the pirate would have a significantly more difficult time to erase the watermark. My guess would be that, with only a single copy, he would have to destroy the contents of the books a huge amount to hide himself, where as the publisher would only need to destroy a very little amount.
steve19 13y ago
This DRM actually changes the content by rewriting the text, not unlike Microsoft Word's grammer checker/corrector tool. I would be very surprised if publishers and authors would go for this. Clumsily changed sentences could ruin a good book. I have always assumed that publishers embed an ID somewhere in the Mobi or EPub files (they are just HTML, you could insert all sorts of things that would never be displayed) since it is trivial to remove the DRM from them.
- mikeash 13y ago
  The willingness of content creators to deliberately distribute an inferior product just to catch pirates never ceases to amaze me.
  - pyre 13y ago
    'Inferior' up until now didn't describe the content, but the rest of the experience. This would change the content itself, which I would expect most authors to be very protective of.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - mikeash 13y ago
      Not entirely true. It's been done in movies for a few years now, to track down leaks from theaters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coded_Anti-Piracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coded_Anti-Piracy Of course, movies and books are probably opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to artistic integrity.
      - tekromancr 13y ago
        They claimed that they were imperceptible, bullshit. I see about 3 or 4 every time I see a movie in theaters. I see it, I notice it, and the fact that they were willing to disrupt their own content bugs me enough that I am unable to enjoy the rest. As far as artistic integrity goes, it makes sense that the immense cost of a film being covered by the studio gives them quite a bit of say in the filmmaking process, for good or ill.
mathrawka 13y ago
And another comment... I've always wondered if companies like Apple, Google, etc do text watermarking of company-wide confidential emails. Everytime I see an e-mail in the full text posted to Techcrunch, I imagine someone just got busted...
- protomyth 13y ago
  not using a watermark but “Steve sent mail last week, he told you not to leak, we were tracking everyone’s mail, and 4 people sent the details to outsiders. They’ve all been terminated and are no longer with the company.” http://lilly.tumblr.com/post/11230723028/steve-jobs http://lilly.tumblr.com/post/11230723028/steve-jobs
- nsp 13y ago
  Elon Musk used this technique at Tesla in 2009, though it backfired hilarious when he didn't tell the company leadership, and the general counsel sent out his version to the entire company as well. Hate using gawker as a source, but it's what I found first: "Musk set out to entrap potential leakers by sending each employee a slightly altered version of an email which he expected would get sent to the media. Musk began the memo, "I'm a big believer in trusting employees." By altering phrases scattered throughout the email — changing "I'm" to "I am," for example — a Tesla IT employee created individualized memos which would have a detectable "fingerprint" in the text. In the memo, Musk asked everyone to sign a new, stricter nondisclosure agreement. The agreement wasn't the point of the email — it was just a ruse to catch the company's leakers." http://gawker.com/5164035/tesla-ceo-in-digital-witch-hunt http://gawker.com/5164035/tesla-ceo-in-digital-witch-hunt
columbo 13y ago
Meh. Buy three ebooks from different accounts, render them to pain text, diff them and take out the differences. Why three? The assumption is 2 books would have the correct value and 1 book would have the copyrighted value. Though I don't see this as DRM. I've done this before on a much smaller scale to track things as they enter the wild. It's just security through obscurity, the digital equivalent of a tracking collar without any of the benefits, like guaranteed uniqueness. It's also crazy overkill. Here's a much simpler way to do it: At the end of every period randomly decide to add an extra space. Hardly noticeable. Spread (again random) between 1024 and 2048 of these over the entire document. Count them up... now you have a pretty decent identifier without having to do any sort of special logic to the words themselves. To the average person it's not noticeable, it doesn't require messing with the original document, and it can be made unique enough to be a digital fingerprint. Of course this house of cards falls apart when you know the secret.
- lqdc13 13y ago
  There would probably be a few things different. I think the different things could just be replaced by a new different thing. For ex if the words are synonyms, auto-replace it by another synonym. Same with punctuation. But now you need something like 3 books instead of 1. So they succeeded in a sense.
- marme 13y ago
  why even bother with this? just randomly change punctuation the same way drm is and they wont be able to match it with the correct account
  - drchiu 13y ago
    That was my first thought as well. Whoever came up with this idea may have more countermeasures, however. For instance, every page may provide a unique enough punctuational fingerprint to identify the buyer.
  - jerf 13y ago
    They know where to look. You don't. You'll be throwing up a lot of chaff in places they aren't looking in the hopes of catching where they are looking in the crossfire, which is an approach that will lead to a degraded book. You can mutate the hell out of the paragraph I just typed, but if you don't know that the only bit I've hidden in that paragraph was "chaff" vs. "noise", you may not hit a thing that I'm looking for. And bear in mind that's two short sentences; if they hide enough of these things in there, they'll have plenty of leftover bits to track you down. columbo's idea is much more solid. It directly identifies the changes, and while it's not even all that challenging to put enough bits into these books to identify which 3 books the pirate copy comes from[1], you are making much greater strides towards defeating the DRM. And if you learn enough from the comparisons to begin reverse-engineering the algorithm, you may be able to entirely defeat it. ("Aha, they always treat "fire" and "flames" as one bit, I'll just use the same one all the time." String enough of those together and you win.) By the way, to any who might question whether students would do this... I used to work on a learning content management system primarily used for highly randomized physics problems. It is absolutely staggering what students will do to cheat. They'll happily generate Excel spreadsheets fully exploring 48 permutations of a problem, each of which may be missing a random 2 out of 5 variables to be solved for, and share it far and wide. Though whether the utility of "not being caught pirating" rises to the level of "hope to score with members of the desirable sex by helping them cheat through a mandatory class" (the only possible motivation I can imagine for some of what we saw) is dubious. [1]: In fact I'd consider it an obvious elaboration to also fingerprint other information into the books, such as destination University, and so on. Basically you're encoding a bit string into the books; you can do all the usual things you do with such bit strings, like parity, encoding various bits of information, etc. It's just steganography being put to a new use, and we know that can encode arbitrary information with arbitrary characteristics.
slig 13y ago
I remember seeing a startup doing something similar to catch employes leaking internal docs. Can't find it now, though.
- brokentone 13y ago
  Agreed, remember a story, but can't place it. The technical term for this apparently is a "Canary trap" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
stormbrew 13y ago
Why on earth do the organizations that 'fight' piracy keep suffering from the delusion that it's just random everyday people who share a copy with a friend that are the source of pirated material on the internet?
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  Interestingly, this would allow the publishers to see how many people are the source of leaks, assuming the leakers don't just do the obvious things to circumvent the watermarking.
- caryhartline 13y ago
  Have you been to a torrent site? Are the hundreds of seeders of a single e-book all friends?
  - stormbrew 13y ago
    I'm really not sure what you thought I was saying.
Ellipsis753 13y ago
I can see some benefits of this but I think the idea of a script automatically going through and making changes is quite horrible. In one example they removed a new paragraph break. That's an unacceptable modification to me. I think that the best way to do something like this (if you want to do it at all) would be if the original author chose 30 small acceptable changes themselves. The presence of these changes (of lack thereof) would then allow a 30 bit ID number to be embedded in the document allowing each copy to be identified separately. They could also have a built in checksum to allow the original ID to be recovered even if some of the changes were found. By increasing this to 100 possible changes (50 active changes in each copy on average) then you could have a very large amount of error correction data and the original ID could still be recovered when a large number were found and changed (this would prevent pirates buying 2/3 copies to find the changes as 2 copies would only highlight half the changes on average if there is an equal chance of the change and original showing). Ultimately I do not think this will work however. A pirate can use a pre-paid credit card to buy the e-book. In this way they cannot be tracked. So I honestly don't think this is worth the effort. Just my thoughts on the matter.
just2n 13y ago
What if someone steals a copy of my file, then uploads it to TPB? Now do I get sued for millions? Am I presumed guilty, since it's clear there's "evidence" to show that I was the source of the now widely spread copy? Do I now have to prove to a judge that I actually didn't upload that file to TPB? Guilty until proven innocent?
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  A new form of evidence doesn't necessarily mean the end of the "reasonable doubt" standard (at least in the US, I don't know how other countries phrase things).
  - Silhouette 13y ago
    Copyright in most cases and most places is still a civil matter, so the standard in many places would be more like "balance of probabilities" rather than "beyond reasonable doubt". In other words, if your personally marked copy of a work was found floating around on the Internet and you got sued for copyright infringement, you'd probably have to convince the court that it was more likely that someone had stolen the work from you and redistributed it than that you had redistributed it in some other way yourself. This isn't a completely safe position even then, because if someone has suffered substantial damages as a result of the work being distributed (and copyright law is infamous for inflated claims of damage caused by infringement) and you have potentially already admitted to being negligent in protecting your copy of the work then you might just find yourself jumping from the frying pan to the fire.
Duhck 13y ago
This is more of treating the symptom(s) and not the problem(s). Regarding DRM in general, it exists to prevent piracy, and piracy exists because content is easier to obtain, consume, and share through these 'illegal' methods. If prices came down, accessibility went up, and shareability is embraced, piracy will fade into the background, and the remaining people doing it will be unjustified in their actions. If content creators and distributions embraced a system that benefitted the consumers everyone would be better off, but they are years (if not decades) behind the times.
cpdean 13y ago
DRM where I can still email my favorite books to friends. I support this.
a_bonobo 13y ago
I speak German and had a look at the example document [1], and it's hard to tell how big the changes are - this document shows the original and the changed version and asks how annoying the changes are, from a scale of 1 to 6, presumably to know how much their algorithm can change before the rights-holders complain. Often, the words are replaced by synonyms ("nicht denkbar", not thinkable gets replaced by "undenkbar", unthinkable) or switches the ordering of words ("zwischen Blei Gold und Silber", between lead, gold an silver becomes "zwischen Gold, Silber und Blei", between gold, silver and lead), just the connection of words is changed ("Schmiergeldübergabe", transfer of bribes, becomes "Schmiergeld-übergabe") or the linebreaks are slightly changed, for example one word is moved to the next line. At this stage, it's very hard to tell how much the final mechanism is going to change the original text, but I can't see much changing of very minor elements like punctuation. It's still a stupid idea since many of these above elements are important to the "vibe" and meaning of a text - the way an author orders elements, or the specific words used by authors can be interpreted differently. [1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/148113352/Sidim-Changes http://www.scribd.com/doc/148113352/Sidim-Changes
ivan_ah 13y ago
> the DRM shuffles some words around, inserts synonyms, changes the paragraph format or the punctuation. For example, the word “unsympathetic” could be changed to “not sympathetic,” and so forth. This is horrible! I would prefer my book to be pirated than to have an algo. mix words up. Besides, if you wanted to do this, why couldn't you use non-printing characters instead, like the soft hyphen U+00AD or zero width space U+200B?
asveikau 13y ago
I have to say I started to have more faith in ebooks when I realized how easy it is to strip DRM from Kindle purchases. I've made more purchases since then and feel better about doing so. I like the convenience of ebooks, the way they make my bookshelves look antiquated, but I always had in my mind the "1984" scenario where they take away your purchases. So I strip the DRM of all my purchases and keep a local copy, even though I only ever read them with the Kindle app. When they take away my ability to do that, I'll stop purchasing.

41 points by Lightning 13y ago

That's not DRM. If anything, that's a textual version of "digital watermarking" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_watermarking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_watermarking It's old news - it's been done to find internal document leakers for years - I believe even in typewriter days. Thing is, it only works on a very small scale, when the people under surveillance are unaware, and are unwilling to collaborate. When these assumptions don't hold, it is trivial to generate a version which has all the information yet does not correspond to any original watermarking (or worse, replicates some watermark that is not part of the set used to generate the version)

davorak 13y ago
> It's old news - it's been done to find internal document leakers for years - I believe even in typewriter days. I knew it was an old technique but I had not thought about it being that old. If you have any idea of where you heard this I would be interesting in knowing.
- shardling 13y ago
  I first read about it in an old Tom Clancy novel. A short bit of googling led me to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap So the technique was well known by 1987, which certainly qualifies as typewriter days. Apparently it was used in fiction as early as 1972.

mathrawka 13y ago

I have worked with e-book authors in creating systems to mitigate piracy of their books. Even if you know who gave out the book that the pirates were able to get, it doesn't make them automatically guilty. In one case, the brother of a customer was the culprit... the author was actually surprised because from the looks of the evidence, it was someone who he trusted that "leaked" the book. Sure, the person could have lied and blamed his brother, but the author trusted him enough to believe the story and accepted the apology from the brother. Anything involving DRM starts to make things get hairy. I can understand the want of the authors to protect their contents that they worked hard on producing. But I also understand how the real customers don't like DRM. In the end, DRM was ditched and a subscription model was created. Both the author and the users were happy with that resolution.

kefs 13y ago
Exactly this. Just because a copy of an ebook I purchased is now floating around the internet, does not, a pirate, make me.

Rangi42 13y ago

I had hoped from the headline that they would be doing something subtle, like replacing some capital "A"s with Greek "Alpha"s, or replacing a single-character "ü" with separate "u" and "combining umlaut". But visible changes that mess with, not just the text formatting, but the actual words of the text, are unacceptable.

gizmo686 13y ago
Invisible changes are trivial for a pirate to undo (once they know what is going on). With visible changes, the pirate would have a significantly more difficult time to erase the watermark. My guess would be that, with only a single copy, he would have to destroy the contents of the books a huge amount to hide himself, where as the publisher would only need to destroy a very little amount.

steve19 13y ago

This DRM actually changes the content by rewriting the text, not unlike Microsoft Word's grammer checker/corrector tool. I would be very surprised if publishers and authors would go for this. Clumsily changed sentences could ruin a good book. I have always assumed that publishers embed an ID somewhere in the Mobi or EPub files (they are just HTML, you could insert all sorts of things that would never be displayed) since it is trivial to remove the DRM from them.

mikeash 13y ago
The willingness of content creators to deliberately distribute an inferior product just to catch pirates never ceases to amaze me.
- pyre 13y ago
  'Inferior' up until now didn't describe the content, but the rest of the experience. This would change the content itself, which I would expect most authors to be very protective of.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - mikeash 13y ago
    Not entirely true. It's been done in movies for a few years now, to track down leaks from theaters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coded_Anti-Piracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coded_Anti-Piracy Of course, movies and books are probably opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to artistic integrity.
    - tekromancr 13y ago
      They claimed that they were imperceptible, bullshit. I see about 3 or 4 every time I see a movie in theaters. I see it, I notice it, and the fact that they were willing to disrupt their own content bugs me enough that I am unable to enjoy the rest. As far as artistic integrity goes, it makes sense that the immense cost of a film being covered by the studio gives them quite a bit of say in the filmmaking process, for good or ill.

mathrawka 13y ago

And another comment... I've always wondered if companies like Apple, Google, etc do text watermarking of company-wide confidential emails. Everytime I see an e-mail in the full text posted to Techcrunch, I imagine someone just got busted...

protomyth 13y ago
not using a watermark but “Steve sent mail last week, he told you not to leak, we were tracking everyone’s mail, and 4 people sent the details to outsiders. They’ve all been terminated and are no longer with the company.” http://lilly.tumblr.com/post/11230723028/steve-jobs http://lilly.tumblr.com/post/11230723028/steve-jobs
nsp 13y ago
Elon Musk used this technique at Tesla in 2009, though it backfired hilarious when he didn't tell the company leadership, and the general counsel sent out his version to the entire company as well. Hate using gawker as a source, but it's what I found first: "Musk set out to entrap potential leakers by sending each employee a slightly altered version of an email which he expected would get sent to the media. Musk began the memo, "I'm a big believer in trusting employees." By altering phrases scattered throughout the email — changing "I'm" to "I am," for example — a Tesla IT employee created individualized memos which would have a detectable "fingerprint" in the text. In the memo, Musk asked everyone to sign a new, stricter nondisclosure agreement. The agreement wasn't the point of the email — it was just a ruse to catch the company's leakers." http://gawker.com/5164035/tesla-ceo-in-digital-witch-hunt http://gawker.com/5164035/tesla-ceo-in-digital-witch-hunt

columbo 13y ago

Meh. Buy three ebooks from different accounts, render them to pain text, diff them and take out the differences. Why three? The assumption is 2 books would have the correct value and 1 book would have the copyrighted value. Though I don't see this as DRM. I've done this before on a much smaller scale to track things as they enter the wild. It's just security through obscurity, the digital equivalent of a tracking collar without any of the benefits, like guaranteed uniqueness. It's also crazy overkill. Here's a much simpler way to do it: At the end of every period randomly decide to add an extra space. Hardly noticeable. Spread (again random) between 1024 and 2048 of these over the entire document. Count them up... now you have a pretty decent identifier without having to do any sort of special logic to the words themselves. To the average person it's not noticeable, it doesn't require messing with the original document, and it can be made unique enough to be a digital fingerprint. Of course this house of cards falls apart when you know the secret.

lqdc13 13y ago
There would probably be a few things different. I think the different things could just be replaced by a new different thing. For ex if the words are synonyms, auto-replace it by another synonym. Same with punctuation. But now you need something like 3 books instead of 1. So they succeeded in a sense.
marme 13y ago
why even bother with this? just randomly change punctuation the same way drm is and they wont be able to match it with the correct account
- drchiu 13y ago
  That was my first thought as well. Whoever came up with this idea may have more countermeasures, however. For instance, every page may provide a unique enough punctuational fingerprint to identify the buyer.
- jerf 13y ago
  They know where to look. You don't. You'll be throwing up a lot of chaff in places they aren't looking in the hopes of catching where they are looking in the crossfire, which is an approach that will lead to a degraded book. You can mutate the hell out of the paragraph I just typed, but if you don't know that the only bit I've hidden in that paragraph was "chaff" vs. "noise", you may not hit a thing that I'm looking for. And bear in mind that's two short sentences; if they hide enough of these things in there, they'll have plenty of leftover bits to track you down. columbo's idea is much more solid. It directly identifies the changes, and while it's not even all that challenging to put enough bits into these books to identify which 3 books the pirate copy comes from[1], you are making much greater strides towards defeating the DRM. And if you learn enough from the comparisons to begin reverse-engineering the algorithm, you may be able to entirely defeat it. ("Aha, they always treat "fire" and "flames" as one bit, I'll just use the same one all the time." String enough of those together and you win.) By the way, to any who might question whether students would do this... I used to work on a learning content management system primarily used for highly randomized physics problems. It is absolutely staggering what students will do to cheat. They'll happily generate Excel spreadsheets fully exploring 48 permutations of a problem, each of which may be missing a random 2 out of 5 variables to be solved for, and share it far and wide. Though whether the utility of "not being caught pirating" rises to the level of "hope to score with members of the desirable sex by helping them cheat through a mandatory class" (the only possible motivation I can imagine for some of what we saw) is dubious. [1]: In fact I'd consider it an obvious elaboration to also fingerprint other information into the books, such as destination University, and so on. Basically you're encoding a bit string into the books; you can do all the usual things you do with such bit strings, like parity, encoding various bits of information, etc. It's just steganography being put to a new use, and we know that can encode arbitrary information with arbitrary characteristics.

slig 13y ago

I remember seeing a startup doing something similar to catch employes leaking internal docs. Can't find it now, though.

brokentone 13y ago
Agreed, remember a story, but can't place it. The technical term for this apparently is a "Canary trap" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap

stormbrew 13y ago

Why on earth do the organizations that 'fight' piracy keep suffering from the delusion that it's just random everyday people who share a copy with a friend that are the source of pirated material on the internet?

andrewflnr 13y ago
Interestingly, this would allow the publishers to see how many people are the source of leaks, assuming the leakers don't just do the obvious things to circumvent the watermarking.
caryhartline 13y ago
Have you been to a torrent site? Are the hundreds of seeders of a single e-book all friends?
- stormbrew 13y ago
  I'm really not sure what you thought I was saying.

Ellipsis753 13y ago

I can see some benefits of this but I think the idea of a script automatically going through and making changes is quite horrible. In one example they removed a new paragraph break. That's an unacceptable modification to me. I think that the best way to do something like this (if you want to do it at all) would be if the original author chose 30 small acceptable changes themselves. The presence of these changes (of lack thereof) would then allow a 30 bit ID number to be embedded in the document allowing each copy to be identified separately. They could also have a built in checksum to allow the original ID to be recovered even if some of the changes were found. By increasing this to 100 possible changes (50 active changes in each copy on average) then you could have a very large amount of error correction data and the original ID could still be recovered when a large number were found and changed (this would prevent pirates buying 2/3 copies to find the changes as 2 copies would only highlight half the changes on average if there is an equal chance of the change and original showing). Ultimately I do not think this will work however. A pirate can use a pre-paid credit card to buy the e-book. In this way they cannot be tracked. So I honestly don't think this is worth the effort. Just my thoughts on the matter.

just2n 13y ago

What if someone steals a copy of my file, then uploads it to TPB? Now do I get sued for millions? Am I presumed guilty, since it's clear there's "evidence" to show that I was the source of the now widely spread copy? Do I now have to prove to a judge that I actually didn't upload that file to TPB? Guilty until proven innocent?

andrewflnr 13y ago
A new form of evidence doesn't necessarily mean the end of the "reasonable doubt" standard (at least in the US, I don't know how other countries phrase things).
- Silhouette 13y ago
  Copyright in most cases and most places is still a civil matter, so the standard in many places would be more like "balance of probabilities" rather than "beyond reasonable doubt". In other words, if your personally marked copy of a work was found floating around on the Internet and you got sued for copyright infringement, you'd probably have to convince the court that it was more likely that someone had stolen the work from you and redistributed it than that you had redistributed it in some other way yourself. This isn't a completely safe position even then, because if someone has suffered substantial damages as a result of the work being distributed (and copyright law is infamous for inflated claims of damage caused by infringement) and you have potentially already admitted to being negligent in protecting your copy of the work then you might just find yourself jumping from the frying pan to the fire.

Duhck 13y ago

This is more of treating the symptom(s) and not the problem(s). Regarding DRM in general, it exists to prevent piracy, and piracy exists because content is easier to obtain, consume, and share through these 'illegal' methods. If prices came down, accessibility went up, and shareability is embraced, piracy will fade into the background, and the remaining people doing it will be unjustified in their actions. If content creators and distributions embraced a system that benefitted the consumers everyone would be better off, but they are years (if not decades) behind the times.

cpdean 13y ago

DRM where I can still email my favorite books to friends. I support this.

a_bonobo 13y ago

I speak German and had a look at the example document [1], and it's hard to tell how big the changes are - this document shows the original and the changed version and asks how annoying the changes are, from a scale of 1 to 6, presumably to know how much their algorithm can change before the rights-holders complain. Often, the words are replaced by synonyms ("nicht denkbar", not thinkable gets replaced by "undenkbar", unthinkable) or switches the ordering of words ("zwischen Blei Gold und Silber", between lead, gold an silver becomes "zwischen Gold, Silber und Blei", between gold, silver and lead), just the connection of words is changed ("Schmiergeldübergabe", transfer of bribes, becomes "Schmiergeld-übergabe") or the linebreaks are slightly changed, for example one word is moved to the next line. At this stage, it's very hard to tell how much the final mechanism is going to change the original text, but I can't see much changing of very minor elements like punctuation. It's still a stupid idea since many of these above elements are important to the "vibe" and meaning of a text - the way an author orders elements, or the specific words used by authors can be interpreted differently. [1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/148113352/Sidim-Changes http://www.scribd.com/doc/148113352/Sidim-Changes

ivan_ah 13y ago

> the DRM shuffles some words around, inserts synonyms, changes the paragraph format or the punctuation. For example, the word “unsympathetic” could be changed to “not sympathetic,” and so forth. This is horrible! I would prefer my book to be pirated than to have an algo. mix words up. Besides, if you wanted to do this, why couldn't you use non-printing characters instead, like the soft hyphen U+00AD or zero width space U+200B?

asveikau 13y ago

I have to say I started to have more faith in ebooks when I realized how easy it is to strip DRM from Kindle purchases. I've made more purchases since then and feel better about doing so. I like the convenience of ebooks, the way they make my bookshelves look antiquated, but I always had in my mind the "1984" scenario where they take away your purchases. So I strip the DRM of all my purchases and keep a local copy, even though I only ever read them with the Kindle app. When they take away my ability to do that, I'll stop purchasing.