Slashdot Mirror
eBook Security?
Chaswell asks: "I just received an email from one of the executives. Of course I really can't say who or where, but he wants to know how we can protect our ebooks from 'crooks'. The publishers that are contracting with us to publish their books in digital format are concerned because they feel that we do not protect the material 'enough'. One of the publishers noticed that if they told their browser to save every page in an online text, low and behold they now had a copy. In early design conversations, I always pushed for not spending time on encryption and watermarking, but just leaving it open. I wanted the utilities and add-ons to be enough that a 'stolen' copy would be of much less value then the original. The argument was that it was not only of lesser value but also the same risk as having a copier in a library. Well this thought seemed to have been enough until this morning. After watching the current court battles, I feel this would be a great waste of devel resources to even attempt to secure the ebooks. So I have couple of questions I could really use Slashdot's input on." Read on for an excerpt of the email that sparked the question and the questions themselves.
"Here is an excerpt of the email message that started this train of thought:
'...think the issue comes down to the industry (Publishing, Digital Book Providers) creating a monitoring body to pursue such postings of "stolen" content...The only other thing I can think of is digital watermarking, which will identify the account through which the book was stolen. Again, it can't prevent dissemination, but does make it easier to track down the infringing party.'
And after thinking on this a bit, I have the following questions:
- Is there a legitimate way to secure the texts to prevent dissemination but still not require a plugin or proprietary browser (we want everyone to be able to read even on the cheapest of library terminals)?
- Does anyone have a solid argument for why encryption/protection will not be necessary?"
Consider that before people were sneaking into movies, they were sneaking into sporting events and plays. I'll be they had gate crashers even in ancient Rome.
The higher-ups need to take a look at the expense and hassle of an encryption technology, and what losses they reasonably expect if your product were presented in plain ASCII text. Reasonable losses is a concept lost on many MBAs. You base your estimates upon past losses, not upon imagined future losses. For example, one of the software publishing groups takes the number of PCs sold, the number of software titles sold, and since the number of PCs is greater, assumes that their software was installed on all those PCs (and were thus pirated). It never enters their minds that not every PC gets commercial software installed on it, or that PCs break, or that not every software title gets installed on every new PC.
Fifty years ago, how did publishers deal with pirated works? Why won't those same techniques work now? (Don't give me that line about the new economy. People still buy things, and it's still illegal to pirate copyrighted works.) Why put yourself in the position of being the police force, including the added expense and hassle. If you're still making money, then you're OK. Turn the evidence over to the Feds, and let them handle it (and the expense).
An easy way to prevent piracy? Make it cheap to be a member who can access eBooks, and provide the eBooks in a variety of formats (including ASCII). Provide a two year free membership for people who turn in other people that are distributing pirated works. Use tiered pricing, where the average person (who is a light reader), can get a title per month for their $20/year fee. For heavier readers, step the price up gently. For libraries and schools, offer a flat, unlimited download fee (like $500/year) but restrict them to one account and password assigned to someone on staff. Talk to the big porn web sites, and find out how they track and identify logins that are fake, or have been shared amongst several users. I'll bet there's a company out there right now that makes software that does access log profiling -- and it wouldn't be that different than the pattern monitoring that many credit card companies offer for tracking purchases.
I think you can make money at $20/year. There's no printing costs, no distributing, no spoilage, no transportation, and no wasted copies. You can still charge vanity press or estimated low sales authors a fee for "sharing in the risk of publication."
The simple truth is that you can't make your product popular and easy to use if there are any requirements for its use. The simple fact that it must be decoded so that it can be read means that every watermarking, steganographic, or encryption method will fail (and the DVD/HDTV folks are spending a lot of money trying to ignore this). Until you can inject your works directly into the brain of the consumer, I doubt that you can avoid piracy. (And even then, some pirate will likely figure out how to use the consumer's brain as the master copy for duplication.)
Be a farmer. Accept that some of the crop is lost every year, and that you've got to make money on the good part of the crop.
Heck, try my model for a year. If you don't make money, you will at least have a bug-free distribution system.