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DRM Books Piracy

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."
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Altering Text In eBooks To Track Pirates

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  • So... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @11:16PM (#44046267) Journal

    Normal book publishers have been doing this for decades, inserting the occasional misspelling here or there. Later, they inserted correct spellings, but of the wrong word, to get around auto-correction in scanner software.

    So...no, they can't patent it.

    • Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Shompol ( 1690084 ) on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @11:28PM (#44046347)
      Yes but this is different because

      ... on a computer

      So yes, they can (and will)

    • Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @11:29PM (#44046361) Homepage Journal

      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.

      • Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Will.Woodhull ( 1038600 ) <wwoodhull@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 19, 2013 @01:46AM (#44046999) Homepage Journal

        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.

        • DRM is all about artificially lowering the value of your product (to the user) in an attempt to make it more valuable. You think anyone in this bizarro world is using a brain?

          • by pmontra ( 738736 )

            I'm not a proponent of DRM and I didn't buy any DRMized item because I want to be sure to able to use what I bought on any future device I'll happen to use. That said, this DRM doesn't seem to lower the value of the text much. It's probably just watermarking, which I'm fine with because I'm not interested in buying something and pirating it.

            Nevertheless I see potential problems with this technology. Files are files, got backup, move to physical media that get lost and sometimes end up in somebody's else han

          • by MrMickS ( 568778 )

            DRM is all about artificially lowering the value of your product (to the user) in an attempt to make it more valuable. You think anyone in this bizarro world is using a brain?

            That's an odd way to view DRM. DRM is about the publishers attempting to associate a cost with the duplication of a work. The cost of creation a copy of a digital work is negligible. The cost of creation of a copy of a physical work isn't, both in materials and time taken to create the duplicate.

            Of course the key really is that there are people that believe that one they have bought something then they have a right to distribute that to others. This is ok in the case of a physical work. You pass it on and y

        • Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)

          by Arrepiadd ( 688829 ) on Wednesday June 19, 2013 @03:42AM (#44047473)

          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

          I didn't read the article because I had seen it earlier in another news source, so I don't if this is mentioned in the one mentioned here, but proofreading may not do it in this case. The source I read mentioned two specific types of change that do not introduce any typos (I'm choosing the exampled myself):
          - One of them was reordering of nouns when the order does not matter, e.g. "Peter and John went for lunch" vs "John and Peter went for lunch";
          - The other was playing with negatives: e.g. "something is unclear" vs "something is not clear"

          Since there are no actual typos, it's hard to spot the identifying bits. You'd have to change the text substantially, in order to have a good chance of being free from discovery. Adding your own typos may not serve any purpose, since the company selling can focus just on the changes they made, not looking for other changes introduced after.

          Of course, if there is a concerted effort to release documents, all pirates would need to do would be buying a few copies and diffing the documents. You may not get the original back, but if the changes are randomly put in a specific set of words, you certainly can end up with something close to the original than any of the sold copies and still free from pirate identification.

      • Your solution is plausible, but it would be too much work and expense for the average ripper.

        The idea is not to have an unbreakable DRM scheme, which would be impossible to create anyway but to raise the cost and difficulty of breaking the scheme to dissuade the casual ripper.

        I'm not even sure that the average joe knows how to "use a statistical analysis to blank out the differences". I certainly don't.

        Plus the fact that it doesn't sound like the results they obtain from that exercise is applicable across t

    • by Tom ( 822 )

      So that's why I come across obvious errors in books where I thought that if it stands out like a sore thumb at a non-native speaker, why the fuck did the proof-readers miss it?

      • Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)

        by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Wednesday June 19, 2013 @01:53AM (#44047039)

        Uh... yes. When you find misspelled words in my messages here, it's just my new DRM. It's just that. It's not that I'm too dumb to use a spellchecker.

      • Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Idaho ( 12907 ) on Wednesday June 19, 2013 @01:58AM (#44047071)

        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?

        • What makes you think pirates won't rip off independent authors? They aren't on a 'reform the publishers' kick, they're on a 'get free stuff' kick. This tactic is to allow publishers or authors or whoever to track back pirated copies to whoever first shared them out. All they need it to automate the system so each book sold has a unique and all but invisible 'watermark', a comma in an odd place, whatever.

          And you know what maybe they have a point; arguments can be made that musicians can earn from live perfor

    • Please let them patent it! Then no-one else will use anything like it for fear of patent infringement.

    • by dbc ( 135354 ) on Wednesday June 19, 2013 @12:14AM (#44046613)

      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.

    • by mbone ( 558574 )

      Normal book publishers have been doing this for decades, inserting the occasional misspelling here or there. Later, they inserted correct spellings, but of the wrong word, to get around auto-correction in scanner software.

      So...no, they can't patent it.

      I think that map makers have been doing this for a century or more.

      "Who's Who" and the like do it as well, inserting fictitious people. This is also because true maps and lists may not be copyrightable, while fictitious ones certainly are.

      • Re:So... (Score:4, Funny)

        by gnasher719 ( 869701 ) on Wednesday June 19, 2013 @03:19AM (#44047385)

        I think that map makers have been doing this for a century or more.

        I remember a pub guide with 1,200 pub reviews including three fake ones, and a newspaper copied (and slightly rearranged the words) of ten of their reviews and managed to copy one of the fake ones. Good fun.

    • Of course, it's an idea that has been around for ages, even for electronic documents. Of course, it doesn't meet the criteria of patentability or even publishability.

      But, I say, let's give them a patent anyway. I think any dumb idea, and in particular any DRM method, deserves a patent granted exclusively to patent trolls. We should even let them get away with "renewing" it indefinitely by the usual dumb stunts.

    • And some newspapers now insert correctly spelled words into their otherwise barely legible text to ... uh... why again do THEY do it?

  • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @11:17PM (#44046269)

    1. Sign up to service with alias
    2. Use untraceable account (prepaid credit card, bitcoin, points card)
    3. Share files with "watermarks"
    4. Don't give a shit that it gets traced back to a throw away account

    They could have saved a significant amount of effort if they had asked me first...

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Acquire multiple copies, run through diff, select most common and correct version each difference, then randomly permute other punctuation in non noticeable ways...

      • by brit74 ( 831798 )
        Yeah, because a pirate wants to buy multiple copies of the same book now.
    • by brit74 ( 831798 )
      Yeah, if your goal from the very start is to buy a book so that you could put it online for other pirates. Most people aren't putting that much forethought into their crimes. 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.
      • by AK Marc ( 707885 )
        Some pirates do do that. But many end up shared from someone who was more careless than complicit.
      • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Wednesday June 19, 2013 @01:24AM (#44046893)

        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]

    • by Duhavid ( 677874 )

      Or normalize all capitalization, punctuation, spelling and grammar.

      • by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Wednesday June 19, 2013 @12:56AM (#44046777)

        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.

      • Then they'll implemented a polymorphic sentence generator. Actually you could set it all up by hand, it wouldn't take too much effort. Pick a handful of sentences, pick a handful of alternative words from a thesaurus or rephrasings that don't change the intent. Heck the alternatives could all be provided by the original author if you like. You'd need less than 60 possible replacements across the whole book to encode a unique enough watermark.
    • by richlv ( 778496 )

      ah, but in germany you have to provide passport or similar id just to get a simcard, thus they can trace you by the connection. just in germany, you say ? surely they will push for this to cover whole eu and then more...
      and germans still had the guts to lecture usa on the internet freedom, anonymity and privacy.

      on the other hand, i don't see how this prevents something like getting a usb stick with the book stolen. usb stick might even be re-found later.

    • by bhmit1 ( 2270 )

      This isn't designed to stop the determined thief, there will still be plenty of piracy. Instead, it's designed to maximize profits from average users. Friends no longer let other friends borrow a copy of their book like they would have done with a physical book, because they are afraid that it could get shared publicly.

      It's not so different from how dvd DRM isn't to stop people from making copies of movies, it's to prevent the manufacturers of players from adding features that customers would like, such as

  • Goddammit. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chrontius ( 654879 ) on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @11:19PM (#44046283)

    I catch all the typos in my books.

    They irritate me.

    I'd probably crack 'em, fix them all, and goddammit, that'd be "circumvention".

    • I catch all the typos in my books.

      Do you really think you'd notice a pattern of extra trailing spaces behind the last words of certain paragraphs of certain chapters?

      • Having noticed that exact thing in Word documents, I would say yes.

        Granted, the documents weren't hundred of pages long, but if I had to actively find extra spaces, the search function would work easily enough.

      • by richlv ( 778496 )

        i'm catching trailing whitespace in all files i can and dealing with it. most of my editors highlight it, so that helps. then there's this bit of sed 's/[ \t]*$//' ;)

        (some pedantic disorder, i know :> )

      • I would! I deal with lots of text at work. Extra spaces bug me because a work app has a 1000 character limit. Ctrl A and they show up like a sore thumb. Beside a simple app could strip trailing and repeated spaces plus a simple grammar check would highlight obvious stuff.
    • Re:Goddammit. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Bremic ( 2703997 ) on Wednesday June 19, 2013 @12:11AM (#44046593)

      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.

      • by TrollstonButterbeans ( 2914995 ) on Wednesday June 19, 2013 @01:12AM (#44046841)
        It's "Shakespeare" but you not know that because you stole ebook and DRM has caught you red-handed as Ebook-pirate-thief.
  • 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.

    In which case they just resort to diff, to remove your hacks and restore the hash.

  • This is so very easy to deal with. Rip at least 3 copies and diff them. The minor tweaks will stand out a mile, and you then have a clean copy you can (and, if they start pulling tricks like this, Should!) distribute widely.

  • You don't know what punctuation their algorithm cares about. The summary's method would not work.

    Diff 2 copies and randomize the selection between the two.

  • The next e-book you buy might not exactly match the printed version. And those changes are there to make sure youâ(TM)re not a pirate.

    German researchers have created a new DRM feature that changes the text and punctuation of an e-book ever so slightly. Called SoDoMy, which Google translates to âoesecure documents by individual fornicating,â the changes are unique to each e-book sold. These alterations serve as a digital penis that can be used to track books that have had any other DRM dildoes

  • Wonder if the eBook was actually stolen from your computer? Either by a friend that has physical access to your computer or in the rare case of a hacker (but who would hack you for eBooks)? Surely, you can't be held reliable for this. Then everyone that actually pirates eBooks and gets caught will just use this excuse as a way to get out of trouble. Else, if you are still held responsible for a stolen eBook from your machine/USB, then it screws over the legitimate users buying eBooks and makes them want
  • by _Knots ( 165356 ) on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @11:26PM (#44046331)

    They don't hash the whole shebang into one number. Rather, they take a (random) number and use that to generate a set of mutations and then probe for that set of mutations in the leaked document. So now, even if you alter the document further, you probably didn't undo the mutations in question. Even if you did, you probably didn't undo all of them and you almost certainly didn't produce a high-confidence result that it's somebody else's copy.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

      • by dargaud ( 518470 )

        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.

        That wouldn't necessarily work. Take a video and introduce a white dot on the lower right corner at 1:13 in one version, and a red dot on the upper right corner at 2:17 on the other. If you average (or scramble the differences) the two, you still end up with a smudge on the lower right corner at 1:13 and another smudge at 2:17, both traceable back to the original videos. You could make it a lot more resilient still by taking a random number, generating a turbo-code [wikipedia.org] for it, and using that to change the file

  • by dido ( 9125 ) <dido.imperium@ph> on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @11:28PM (#44046353)

    There was an article [slashdot.org] about it here a few years ago. A followup [slashdot.org] someone made to a comment I wrote to the article mentions some work being done by some guy from Purdue that sounds a lot like what's being done here. IBM also seems to be doing work [slashdot.org] on canary trap-based ideas.

  • by XaXXon ( 202882 ) <xaxxon AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @11:30PM (#44046365) Homepage

    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.

    • that was my though i often have ebooks on a usb drive and i often loan usb drives to classmate when they forget theirs and need to move a file between their laptop and the the school workstations, what if one of them were to see my ebook and copy it.

  • Learn (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Scutter ( 18425 ) on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @11:31PM (#44046369) Journal

    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.

  • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @11:31PM (#44046373)

    - Scan/OCR book
    - Google translate into German
    - Google translate back into English
    - Print book

    Voila! No more watermark. You can share with confidence.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by xQx ( 5744 )
      Yes, so:

      "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?
  • by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @11:32PM (#44046381)
    Who says it's a hash? Just add one extra space somewhere in the book in an unusual place or replace an apostrophe with a similar character or something. Then if someone adds something else, you're still checking for that one single location of the alteration to prove it's them. It'd be awfully unlikely in a long book that you'd replicate the exact alteration that they made to someone else's book, thus appearing to be 2 different people.
    • Can't pirates just write a script to fix all spaces and punctuation and spelling mistakes? Grammar mistakes would be the hardest or if a word is "misspelled" into an actual word (like spelling "too much" as "to much" or "two much"). I think fixing spaces/apostrophes/etc. would be the easiest.
  • Don't they do this to pre-release screenings and theatre viewings of movies to find out who done the leak or who let the video camera into the theatre?

    • by Anarchduke ( 1551707 ) on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @11:54PM (#44046493)
      Yes, which is why they have successfully stamped out piracy, it is part of the sordid past of the Internet. Thank god we'll never see pirated e-books again.
    • That just targets the theaters where the offending recording is made, not the person making the recording. All it does is making theaters more vigilant against people smuggling in cameras.

      And then I don't get the point of those cam rips. I've downloaded a few, but didn't get further than five minutes into the movie as the quality is so terrible. Low res, poor sound - just not watchable.

  • If the content of a book--what is thought up and written by a human--is what is traditionally copyrighted, then what exactly are they copyrighting in this case? Obviously the content is "written" by the writer and then published in an electronic book format similarly to how it would be printed on pages and made into a physical book, but if that content is automatically tampered with by machines it is no longer what the author wrote. How would copyright work in this case? Hundreds of copyrights of individ

    • No issue there. Changing a few letters in Harry Potter doesn't make it your work, either. Under copyright, copies don't have to be exact (otherwise taping a song from radio would never have been an issue), it has to be very similar. Likewise a band playing covers of another band: they're different, some notes are wrong, rhythms are slightly off, yet it's still the same song.

      Furthermore it's fully legal to get inspiration from someone else's work - and use elements of copyrighted works in your own works. You

  • While I haven't tried on any DRM'd ebooks, Calibre's converters have to options to play with all kinds of spacing and punctuation during conversion (smart punctuation, transliterate unicode to ascii). I've used them when converting text documents and saved web pages to epub, and they make very nice ebooks. I have a hard time believing that this kind of steganography would survive such a reformatting, but I guess we'll hear about it eventually if it does.

  • strip (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @11:43PM (#44046425) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • by celle ( 906675 )

      "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."

      What makes you think students haven't already gotten in trouble over this? I see lawsuits on the horizon for colleges who kicked out students that this crap caused

  • by Russ1642 ( 1087959 ) on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @11:44PM (#44046435)
    I'm going to stop sending every typo and punctuation mistake I catch to Amazon. I thought I was helping.
  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @11:45PM (#44046441)

    After all, we saw how quickly the iTunes Store withered and died after the DRM got removed from all that music. It'd be crazy for the publishers NOT to double down on DRM!

  • So just remove all punctuation STOP Like old telegrams STOP Problem solved STOP

  • It should be fairly easy to defeat. All someone needs is several different copies of the book and do a comparison. It should be easy to spot what has changed and then undo them.

  • by Stonefish ( 210962 ) on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @11:53PM (#44046485)

    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.

    • I'm told map makers have been doing this forever. They move symbols slightly, change the placing of text and introduce new, insignificant features. All to stop other publishers from copying their maps, or using them as the basis for maps they pass off as their own work
  • After you run a couple of copies through to strip this DRM, you need to add your own back in so their DRM verifier will translate it to, "I bet you thought this technique was clever, you fucking git."
  • So what? What that does prove? That someone (maybe the one who bought the book, maybe not) took this book and shared it???
    I still don't see how based on such a funny "watermark" they this could stand in the court. Anyone? Can you prove me wrong?
  • Just two copies of a book are probably enough to learn how to break the system, and a few more to know how to rig the text to target a particular poor schmuk.

  • So that explains why the paid for ebooks of older texts have a pile of annoying mistakes while the Project Gutenberg version doesn't. I'd thought it was just publishers being sloppy and having very little respect for their customers, but at least now I know it's because they have even less respect for their customers and think their customers are thieves that want to "steal" the older books the publishers are not paying any royalties on.

    Enough ranting at the big guys who are going for maximum dollar extra
  • by Gumbercules!! ( 1158841 ) on Wednesday June 19, 2013 @12:55AM (#44046775)
    So if my phone gets stolen and my eBooks get leaked, I'm now double screwed?
  • by deoxyribonucleose ( 993319 ) on Wednesday June 19, 2013 @02:34AM (#44047221)

    Any publishers using this technique had better have iron-clad contracts with their authors permitting arbitrary alterations to their works. Otherwise, they are in clear violation of the authors' moral rights to protection against distortion and mutilation of their original work.

    It's eerily reiminscent of the 'We had to incinerate the village in order to protect it' military communique.

    Anybody know if standard boilerplate agrements from the major publishers actually sign away the authors' moral rights against deliberate mutilations (as opposed to inadvertent proofing errors)?

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