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E-Book Copy Protection, For What It's Worth
AudioBooksForFree.Com writes "WHSmith have challenged AudioBooksForFree.Com to breaks Microsoft Reader e-book protection. It just took 30 minutes." No, they didn't break the encryption; instead, this is just an application of the idea that it's very hard to make something which can be displayed but not copied.
I used to work for a typesetting company on my industrial placement (internship in US terms), and we also produced SGML documents for another company who created audio versions of the files we supplied.
The previous placement student came in handy when the audio book company lost the master password to a whole archive of audio books, he cracked the files and unlocked the affected files. The other company was run by friends of the management of our company, so there weren't any 'confidentiality agreements' or anything... but I dread to think how the current laws (which weren't implemented then) would have affected us there.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Heh. I also bought that book. But you went through way too much work. The book allowed itself to be printed... heh. So all I did was install a print to file driver, and printed the whole thing to PostScript. Perfect copy. And its simple to go from PostScript PDF HTML Whatever.
For another answer to DRM garbage, Baen, publishers of sci-fi and fantasy books have the 100% correct idea about eBook copy restriction and encryption:
Don't do it!
They just released the latest book in their Honor Harington series on Tuesday, and it included a CD with various formats of eBooks of every book in that series and other books that they publish. And best of all, no stupid restrictions. Here's their release about the CD.
I applaud their move, and recommend purchasing this book and others from them (Note: I'm a big fan of the author, David Weber, but not involved with Baen in any way, etc...).
Baen Books, who are known on Slashdot for their Free Library, and who also offer their WebScriptions, all of which in several formats including e-books, do not to use encryption in the e-books they publish. Roughly, their argument is that it's costly, useless and unfair.
From the 6th Prime Palaver: The Library's track record shows clearly that the traditional "encryption/enforcement" policy which has been followed thus far by most of the publishing industry is just plain stupid, as well as unconscionable from the viewpoint of infringing on personal liberties. (...) the fundamental obstacle to the success of electronic publishing [is] the industry's obsession with encryption. I suggest you read the whole document, it's quite interesting.
On Mac OS X it would have been even easier, since it included print-to-PDF in the standard printing library. There's no step 3 :P
Someone else mentioned that Windows Media Player prevented screen copy. The reason for this is video overlay. Most graphic cards support overlays as faster ways of writing streams of changing video frames to the display without worring about the actual window. If you turn graphic acceleration all the way down in WMP I believe it will play directly to the player window rather than overlay, thereby allowing a capture but most cards won't be able to keep up the same performance that way. I was on some site looking at satellite images a few months ago (I think TerraServer) and they gave me the option of smaller images, or nice big images with copy protection (which required a plugin download to see them, though still right in the browser). I tried to capture the images then using PrtScrn and got logos of the copy protection with no sat image. It seemed likely that the window showed the logo, then they used video overlay for the actual images. I wonder why makers of eBook readers don't use overlays in the same manner for this reason. I used the MS Reader awhile ago and it seemed to allow specific titles to allow/disallow printing, clipboard copy, and Save As functionality. If they also used overlays they would be much harder to defeat (though of course still not impossible). As it is, it would take less than an hour to automate PrtScrn, OCR/save, push keystrokes to change to next page. Images are nice, but MS Office XP includes nice OCR now so the tools are mostly at hand!
On the plus side, some of the old versions of realplayer allow print screen if you are at full screen.
In realplayer 7 and 8 for Windows, I can go to View > Preferences > Performance and turn off "Use optimized video display", and realplayer won't use an overlay.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you have "Full window dragging" (or whatever it's called on your system) enabled, you can also grab a screenshot by hitting PRNTSCRN while you are dragging the RealPlayer window around. The image in the window switches from overlay to the standard video system while being dragged.
--DennyK
I've been emailing the guy who did this - he hadn't even *heard* of Palladium or the ridiculous laws proposed to close the analog hole. So all of his bold assertions about this stuff ALWAYS and FOREVER being ways to circumvent copy-protection are just so much ill-informed nonsense.
www.sjbaker.org
In order for a monitor to work, it must be viewable
I know that's a blindly flash of the obvious, but the author's point still stands. While you might no longer be able to do digital screen captures via PrintScreen or software, at worst case you could still take a picture of the screen and OCR it.
He made an extremely good reminder to people that, so long as people are involved, encryption will ultimately fail on some level, because the end product MUST be decrypted for us to use.