Altering Text In eBooks To Track Pirates 467
wwphx writes "According to Wired, 'German researchers have created a new DRM feature that changes the text and punctuation of an e-book ever so slightly. Called SiDiM, which Google translates to 'secure documents by individual marking,' the changes are unique to each e-book sold. These alterations serve as a digital watermark that can be used to track books that have had any other DRM layers stripped out of them before being shared online. The researchers are hoping the new DRM feature will curb digital piracy by simply making consumers paranoid that they'll be caught if they share an e-book illicitly.' I seem to recall reading about this in Tom Clancy's Patriot Games, when Jack Ryan used this technique to identify someone who was leaking secret documents. It would be so very difficult for someone to write a little program that, when stripping the DRM, randomized a couple of pieces of punctuation to break the hash that the vendor is storing along with the sales record of the individual book."
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
... on a computer
So yes, they can (and will)
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
And if the publisher do change texts in different e-books anyone that wants to get around it would just need a few copies and use a statistical analysis to blank out the differences.
This is similar to what steganography [wikipedia.org] does, so if you mess up the punctuation inserted then it will be really hard to look up the perpetrator - or even that the wrong party will be pointed out.
So now the Pandora's box is opened.
What does this actually prove? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is accidentally leaving a copy somewhere copyright infringement? How do they know the person they sold it to is the person who leaked it.
Also, it's never been clear to me when copyright infringement actually occurs.
Learn (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, you know, maybe learn from the success of Apple iTunes and start selling eBooks for a reasonable cost and maybe they won't be pirated nearly as much. I know that the publishing process costs money that you deserve to recoup, and you deserve to make a profit, but it is offensive to charge as much as (or more) than a physical book for an eBook.
Re:Defeated in one... (Score:2, Insightful)
Acquire multiple copies, run through diff, select most common and correct version each difference, then randomly permute other punctuation in non noticeable ways...
strip (Score:5, Insightful)
It depends. If it's done well, it can be fairly resistant to any noise introduced into the system.
As an author myself, I see a very different issue with this. I don't want some robot changing my text. Some of those words it might decide to change because they are similar I may have pained over and decided for a reason to use this one and not the other one. Granted, few authors pick every single word intentionally, but the software won't know which ones are carefully selected.
Often times, there is subtle meaning. For example, I might decide to always use the same phrase in certain contexts, giving a very subtle hint to the reader which things are alike and which ones are different. One he might not even notice consciously.
It also will cause all sorts of trouble to quoting. How will teachers handle this if a student quotes a text but the quote differs slightly from the version the teacher has read? One of the most important things we teach students is that quotes need to be exactly as they appear, with any omissions or changes clearly marked.
That also extends to quotes within the text. If character A reports what character B said, I doubt the system will have enough text understanding to change both texts the same way, so the reader will be left wondering if it is intentional that there's a slight difference and what the author wants to hint at, when there's no such thing implied.
This idea is as new as my grandma (Score:4, Insightful)
There were printers in areas with classifed documents which automatically used to do this. They worked with whitespace, fonts and punctuation. Photocopies of the documents could still be tracked. Great work guys you deserve a badge.
Amazon will be able to close the loop by automatically downloading the books that you have on your kindle to "check" that you don't infringe and stomp on those badguys.
Re:Goddammit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine going to Shakespear and saying "Sure we will publish your plays, but every person who buys a copy will get a different version where we change the words and the cadence a bit."
Buy a copy of a play for every actor, all of them have minor variations which cause massive confusion.
Hell, change the Bible randomly; that wouldn't get noticed at all.
Re:Defeated in one... (Score:4, Insightful)
It'd be easy to make minor alterations to the text itsself. Perhaps a character can be described as dark-haired and wearing a red shirt in one version, but wearing a red shirt and dark-haired in another. Find 32 such places and you can identify four billion unique versions.
Re:That's not how traitor-tracing algorithms work (Score:2, Insightful)
Well if you seriously want to get around this, you need two accounts. Take two documents diff them and remove and/or correct what you see.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
There would be no need to reverse engineer a pristine copy of the work. Simply proofreading a single copy and correcting some of the existing errors, while at the same time, introducing a few new errors of the same type would be enough to confound any attempt to make a positive identification of the source.
This approach has an incredibly high bogosity factor. I can't imagine anyone in the publishing industry with half a brain who would spend any money on its implementation... Oh wait. We are talking about the partially brain dead idjits who thought DRM was the best thing since sliced bread....
If I was going to do this, I would probably also play with the kerning to force some repagination, add some space characters before the newline at the end of some paragraphs, and so on. This approach to DRM is about as simple to get around as using a black magic marker on the edge of an "uncopyable" CD disk.
Re: So... (Score:4, Insightful)
C'mon, where have you been hiding? Adding "on a computer", or, more recently, "on the internet" makes everything patentable again.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, this is one more reason for good authors to avoid traditional publishers. I can think of quite a few authors who would have a thing or two to say about algorithms like these being used to modify their work.
Just like in the music industry, big publishers are simply not necessary anymore. Editors most certainly are, but publishers?
Re:Too much work (Score:5, Insightful)
..., but it would be too much work and expense for the average ripper.
Until someone writes a program for it, so the average ripper only has to push a button.