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."
So... (Score:5, Informative)
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)
... on a computer
So yes, they can (and will)
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And so far this has prevented what?
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:5, Funny)
And then "on a mobile device but with slightly rounded corners".
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.
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.
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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?
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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
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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)
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.
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That's what I was thinking. So would-be pirates get together, buy a couple copies of the book, compare them for differences, and post a version of the book that combines both alterations in a random method thus ruining the tracking.
Of course, DRM like this isn't really meant to prevent copying as much as it is meant to form a speed bump to deter the more casual would-be-pirates. (Let's be honest, no DRM stops the more serious pirates.) If this was the only DRM that was deployed, I'd actually support it v
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That's what I was thinking. So would-be pirates get together, buy a couple copies of the book, compare them for differences, and post a version of the book that combines both alterations in a random method thus ruining the tracking.
The "Nirvana fallacy" is the assumption that something needs to be perfect to be usable. If I have an ebook, and you want the same ebook, I can just copy it and give the copy to you. I can send it to you as an email attachment. Nothing could be simpler. 80% of all customers would know how to do this. And that is stopped if I know that by giving you a copy I put the book out of my control, you could be some idiot who puts the stuff on a website and then it's my problem, so I'm not giving you a copy.
Now th
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That's what I was thinking. So would-be pirates get together, buy a couple copies of the book, compare them for differences, and post a version of the book that combines both alterations in a random method thus ruining the tracking.
The way this system might work is to have 32 possible differences per book, where each difference can be thought of as a single bit (e.g., "is not" in one version and "isn't" in another). The combination of differences would allow 4 billion different versions, more than enough for even the most insane best seller.
So, if you only have 3 versions, you might see as few as two bits of information. You could get lucky and see a lot more, but even so, the publisher could likely localize the leak to a very small
Too much work (Score:3)
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
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.
Re:Too much work (Score:5, Funny)
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The point I was making was not to state to create an unaltered copy of the original but get enough data on the variation of the copies to be able to mess up the watermark enough to render it useless. Random pick of formatting/wording in deviating sections from one of the N copies obtained at each case. The result may be that you have variants A, B and C as source and your scrambling causes it to look like variant K, so the buyer of variant K will be blamed until they figure out that they are chasing in the
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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)
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)
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?
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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
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Please let them patent it! Then no-one else will use anything like it for fear of patent infringement.
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.
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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)
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.
oh, let's grant them a patent! (Score:2)
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.
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And some newspapers now insert correctly spelled words into their otherwise barely legible text to ... uh... why again do THEY do it?
Defeated in one... (Score:5, Funny)
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...
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Acquire multiple copies, run through diff, select most common and correct version each difference, then randomly permute other punctuation in non noticeable ways...
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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.
Re:Defeated in one... (Score:5, Funny)
No, I said it was music!
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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]
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Or normalize all capitalization, punctuation, spelling and grammar.
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.
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No you would need more than two copies. Imagine you have 100 such things as "Peter and Jane" or "Jane and Peter" that represent a one or zero. That is a 100 bit binary code we could put in the book. Assume that your book is going to be wildly successful so we allow 33 bits for the unique number (that's more than the current population of the world) and the remaining 67 to be an error code. Now to change the watermark you need to change 68 of the 100 individual marks in the book. The more error correcting bi
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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.
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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)
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".
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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?
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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.
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"I see there are no double spaces in your copy. This is a clear sign that you pirated it."
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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 :> )
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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:Goddammit. (Score:5, Funny)
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As somebody who has done lighting (for a very small production), it can be bloody difficult when people start ad-libbing because it can really screw with the cues that you're waiting for. So I'm with the GP - minor changes can cause major confusion.
sure (Score:2)
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.
So, rip 3 copies of the ebook and diff them. (Score:2)
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.
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So, if I give the program 3 copies of "50 shades of grey" it would return a version that is safe for my kids to read?
Just diff 2 copies (Score:2)
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.
Article in case of slashdotting (Score:2, Funny)
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
actually stolen (Score:2)
That's not how traitor-tracing algorithms work (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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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
Similar to something Amazon patented (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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.
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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)
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:Learn (Score:5, Funny)
That's not how dyeing industries work.
You negative attitude is colouring your response.
Great trick to remove the watermark (Score:5, Funny)
- Scan/OCR book
- Google translate into German
- Google translate back into English
- Print book
Voila! No more watermark. You can share with confidence.
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"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?
as a software programmer... (Score:3)
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Done already (Score:2)
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?
Re:Done already (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
So, uh... what are they copyrighting then? (Score:2)
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
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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
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Ah, I see--that clears it up well. I still think the idea of altering the writer's words and punctuation in the name of piracy is going too far though.
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Agreed, but that's a whole different issue.
Calibre (Score:2)
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)
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.
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"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
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You don't need to actually change words, and they probably won't for all the reasons you cited.
RTFA. Changing words and phrases is exactly what this is about.
Whitespace is trivial to "fix". There's only one correct way to do it (one space), so a script to correct all of it (removing the watermark) would be an hour of work, tops.
Changing meaningful whitespace, i.e. linebreaks into spaces or vice-versa runs into the same problem I outlined. As an author, I actually make a choice there and there's a reason for where I start a new line or paragraph.
Amazon Kindle Books (Score:3)
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Funny you should bring this up. Read an ebook a few weeks back, a decent sci-fi novel (novella, morelike, given word count) and had run into enough typos that it had in some places seriously disrupted the reading flow. (Often the mind will correct or elide over the error while in hot pursuit of a scene, other times it's like tripping over a pebble on the path, and some few times it's more a full stop and restart.)
I wrote the author, asking if he'd maybe like some free help to catch the stupidly simple stu
It's understandable (Score:4, Funny)
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!
easy solution (Score:2)
So just remove all punctuation STOP Like old telegrams STOP Problem solved STOP
Should be easy to defeat (Score:2)
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.
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.
Probably older than your great-grandma (Score:2)
So obviously (Score:2)
You catch the buyer. (Score:2)
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?
will be quickly cracked (Score:2)
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.
That explains it! (Score:2)
Enough ranting at the big guys who are going for maximum dollar extra
What about stolen phones? (Score:3)
Violating copyright in order to enforce it (Score:3)
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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No, you become a suspect. To become a criminal you need to at least provide reasonable doubt - like evidence of your stolen files.
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It'd only be a criminal matter if someone tried to get the DMCA anti-circumvention measures or the NET act involved. Your basic copyright infringement is a civil matter, so the burden of proof is lower.
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As you're talking about China, are you talking about pirates that are commercial businesses reselling those works? Or just individuals that like to share their stuff with friends and friends of friends?
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Possession?
The way I looked, it is the uploading and downloading that may enter under the incidence of copyright law [arstechnica.com] (upload infringes on the "distribution rights" while download infringes the "reproduction rights"). In some countries, the download [wikipedia.org] is actually legal (as long it's not for profit)
Possession? I can imagine heaps of ways in which one can be in the possession of a digital copy without be necessarily responsible for copyright infringement.
Imagine someone places a bootlegged copy on the shelves o
Re: (Score:3)
One word: PRISM.
Perhaps I'm scaremongering, but are you willing to bet against mission creep from using such intelligence assets against so-called terrorism via kiddie porn to copyright infringement? Given how US election campaigns are being financed?
Re: (Score:3)
So you have to upload your book to somewhere secret where you trust and hope Mr Bookz will will strip out your id. And if your uploaded book does leak into the wild (because Mr Bookz is an asshole or i