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."
Decades? Try centuries... (Score:5, Interesting)
Shortly after the moveable type press got going in Europe, books of tables of interest rates were popular among the merchants. Of course, they all had to be laboriously hand calculated by mathematicians (long division was college undergraduate math in those days...). Publishers would sprinkle errors into the least signficant digits on various entries to use as evidence in copyright cases. Because, you know, if you had a printing press, you could make good money by pirating somebody else's table of interest rates.
Re:Great trick to remove the watermark (Score:2, Interesting)
"They sat by the kitchen table and discussed the morning's news"
English-German-English becomes:
They all sat around the large rectangular lump of wood suspended by four vertical pillars and held a multidirectional conversation regarding that day before noon which owned its events.
Or English-Mandarin-English becomes:
Sat in Kitchen by table discussed news of morning.
What could possibly go wrong?
Re:Defeated in one... (Score:5, Interesting)
And once you bought a book (with your own credit card), and then decide afterwards that you want to put it out there for pirates, suddenly, you realize that it's not such a good idea.
You realize it's not such a good idea... and 3/4 of a second later you just download it from another source. So you've really accomplished little.
Has Apple's similar approach impacted music piracy?
"Apple embeds your account information in all songs sold on the store, not just DRM-free songs. Previously it wasn't much of a big deal, since no one could imagine users sharing encrypted, DRMed content. But now that DRM-free music from Apple is on the loose, the hidden data is more significant since it could theoretically be used to trace shared tunes back to the original owner."
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2007/05/apple-hides-account-info-in-drm-free-music-too/ [arstechnica.com]
Re:Defeated in one... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, it's not so far fetched that there will be various files that reach back to one source. I remember a certain song that had a quite noticeable glitch somewhere, a compression mistake or something like that. I know for a fact that it wasn't meant to be that way because it was played up and down on every radio station and music TV station, every time without that glitch (and it just sounded like a compression bug, too). The same applies to the pressed CD because I later bought it just for the sole reason to find out whether that glitch is supposed to be there, and on the original pressed disc there was no such artifact.
But no matter where I went and at what party I heard it, I always heard exactly the same glitch. Ok, one may say, it's a local thing. So I thought, too, until I heard it at a party on a different continent. I waited for it, and I was quite amazed to hear that well known glitch.
And then on YouTube...
And it wasn't some obscure, barely known song, it was something that clogged the airwaves for quite a while. I later tried to create an MP3 of the file myself to check whether it was some obscure reason why it "has to" end up with that glitch when converted and no, at least my converter managed to encode it flawlessly.
So I guess the only conclusion I could come up with is that everyone on this PLANET downloaded the same file from the same crappy source. One person encoded it and everyone downloaded from him.
Kinda amazing that it still was such a seller. I mean, isn't the big complaint of the music industry that everyone is just downloading it? And obviously, for this song one sold CD would have sufficed to satisfy the damned... I mean the demand.