Glassbook Reader Paranoia

Linh Ngo writes "To follow-up on your recent Stephen King electronic book, you might be interested in a story I wrote at open content.net which brings to light the absurd copy protection that Glassbook Reader uses. In short, you must call customer support if you change your hard-disk or upgrade your cpu, and copying the book from one computer to another is a no-no. The built-in copy protection renders your ebook useless. This is son of DIVX all over again. "

Copy protection online.

[Big Boss]

*sigh*.

And here I thought that the oldest media was going to be the first to grasp how to market to the latest one.

Proposal:

Get a group together (maybe through opencontent.org) and try to create a distribution system that we can live with but still have some way to go after copyright violators.

We need to realize that they are very concerned about theft online. Look at MP3s, whatever your stance on them you have to admit that they are stupidly easy to copy and pirate. We need to have something that will allow them to have some protection while still allowing us to use the info in a reasonable way. It will have to be some interesting technology to get them to buy off on it. It must be open source and not worry about debuggers.

The fact is, nothing can ever contain it totally. But maybe we can help develop something we can all live with. We need to get them to realize that draconian restrictions for legimate users isn't the answer either. But we should be willing to come up with a middle ground soultion too. If all we are willing to do is trupmet full openness with no protection whatsoever we will get nowhere. With paper they have some assurance that it's probably more expensive to copy than to buy it. With bits and bytes where it's a mouse click worth of effort to copy, they don't get the warm fuzzy. We need to find a way to satisfy both sides. Tricky, but I think it can be done. Any takers? If there is a discussion on this topic allready in place on the net someone post a link!

Why copy protect something free?

[raygundan]

What am I supposed to do with an electronic book I can't move from even from one HD to another? What if I upgrade my CPU? I have to call tech support? This is absolutely ridiculous. Especially for a free book-- why copy protect something that is being given away for free? I would happily buy all my books electronically, and anxioulsy await the day that I can get any book I want, instantly, online with my credit card. There are quite a few out-of-print vintage sci-fi books I'd love to get my hands on, if only old books would be made available electronically! If the electronic book is not AT LEAST as usable as its paper counterpart was, then I will NOT even consider buying it. This includes, loaning it to a friend, reading it at work, at home, in my car, on vacation, and in a foreign country. It also includes the ability to keep on reading the book for centuries regardless of what changes I make to my computer. (Just like a real book. My paperbacks don't seem to mind if I upgrade my processor and hard drive-- why should electronic versions of the same books care?) I am appalled.

Publishing companies, sign me up for electronic books the second you have a clue. Until then, I'll be (grudgingly) purchasing (wasteful and degradeable, but functional) paperback copies of books I want to read, because at least they will be usable to me after I (most definitely) upgrade my computer in the next 6 months.

No debuggers!

[wnissen]

I would point out that another interesting condition is that you cannot run Glassbook when a debugger is running. This is presumably to prevent something like DeCSS where the key was stored unmunged in a variable. However, how could they ever hope to be considered for technical books with this restriction. Besides the obvious problems with detecting a debugger, what about having an O'Reilly book open in the reader at the same time as debugging some code? You'd have to close one before being able to open the other. It's a tremendous pain in the ass, especially since EBX'll probably get broken anyway.

Walt

Re:Copy protection online.

[ripicheep]

This is following a somewhat disturbing trend of mainstream media trying to have their cake and eat it too with respect to the internet and digital formats.

Music, television, and print media companies are realizing that there is a demand and a market for their works in a digital format. These companies want to offer their products to us the consumers over a digital medium, but they don't want us to be able to take advantage of any of the benefits that come with digital media, such as ability to copy, edit and distribute at will.

The same reasons that digital distribution appeal to the media, are a concern to them once the product has left their clutches.
The e-book industry wants a format that they can send to you over the internet, that gives high quality text, and that costs little or nothing for them to produce and reproduce. But they don't want the format to be readily coppiable or distibutable by the end user. An appropriate solution has not yet been found.

So, as a solution that shows little chance of being effective, laws such as the DMCA are being passed to try to limit the technology in stead of developing technology that works.
Laws that limit the legal use of technology are unconscienable. If coppying a friends CD is illegal, then it is illegal whether I do it with a computer, or by taping it onto a cassette, or a DAT copy off of the radio. Making it illegal to use a computer to do something that is already illegal makes no sense. Especially when these laws are written so broadly as to limit legal as well as illegal activities.

And privacy concerns?

[zlexiss]

I haven't downloaded the reader, but couldn't find anything on the website about whether or not the reader is sending any personal or other info back to glassbook. Anyone see anything on this?

zlexiss

No Debugger?

[DaveHowe]

On the other hand, CyberPatrol were sure you couldn't reach their encrypted files either. I suspect a few people will be playing with the code in a suitable environment already....
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