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Adobe Finds No Elcomsoft-Cracked E-Books
dJCL writes "I noticed at BlackMask.com that the Adobe investigators have found not a single e-book that was decrypted by Elcomsoft's Advanced e-Book Processor, even despite the months of intensive searching of around 100,000 pirated e-books that they could find(i.e. something else was used to crack them). Just love how the laws have been able to stop people from pirating things these days."
For them to be downloading ebooks they don't own?
"Movie and recording studios, among others, say the law is necessary to stop pirating of intellectual property, which is made easy when the material is in digital format."
Unlike a VCR, which is a bitch to use.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
Embarrassed to live in a society where capitalism takes this form. That is, the form which allows whiney 8 year-olds at the helm of massive companies who complain that a little wet spot means someone's pissed in the sandbox.
The DMCA only requires that the criminal defendant produced software aimed at circumventing copy protection. Using such software to actually circumventing copy protection is a separate offense (also under the DMCA). So the fact that they found no evidence of the software actually being used for piracy will not save the defendant from the offense of having produced the software in the first place
...whether they took any action against any of the sites/people offering the 100,000 "pirated books".
Seems to me that Adobe is merely trying to find a scapegoat, but chose an entirely wrong example to set.
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That it wasn't much to crack anyway. It's a very simple crypto scheme, and it doesn't work... why can't judges understand this?
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
No, the line is "See how bad we need the (insert name of bill worse than DMCA)?"
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
What about the visual equivalent of plugging an analogue cable into the headphone socket - take screenshots of each page and then save as JPEGs? The only surefire way of preventing e-book piracy is to prevent people from reading the things in the first place.
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
So let me get this straight. I can go buy a gun, with little or no background checking, and have the potential to kill dozens of children, and it isn't illegal. Or, I could make a program that could theoretically be used to pirate some stupid ebooks, and that's illegal. Wow. That's such a fucked up set of priorities my head hurts. I'm going to go drown myself now...oh fuck! That's illegal too!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Many people are ignorant or simply don't care until they see a direct effect on their own life. Add in the fact that a tiny minority actually makes the laws, and you get laws that sometimes don't make sense or that are unpopular. It is a price we pay for using a representative form of government.
Of course, you still have the Supreme Court who are there to make sure the laws don't break the bigger laws (like freedom of speech). That can help balance things out.
Without the crack:
Braille readers cannot read the work. Since they are essentially fancy serial devices, you could fake a driver and have the work printed to a file if they did.
Students, cannot cut and past a graph or text from them. They cannot resell the book when they are done with it, They cannot even give it a way. Why, because they tie themselves to one and only one computer.
Three years from now when the the ebook is out of print and your computer dies, that is the end of the book.
If you buy an ebook today, and your computer crashes or you buy a new one that is the end of the ebook unless you want to spend an hour on a phone trying to prove what happened.
A few types of ebooks are more liberal today, but at the time this software was made most every ebook were locked down to an insane extreme.
So there are several apparently legal uses for this software, some of which do not even involve the act of copying the work.
Finally, I noticed the Prosecutor called the software burglar tools. Well last I checked even they are legal to make and sell. They are illegal to possess if you are not a lock smith. So even that analogy is flawed.
The fact is, is that I believe the corporations assess the possibility for theoretical damages (Decreased revenue for an archaic archival system is hardly damages in my mind) before the threat of theoretical damages even comes. Then they get all pissy and sue someone. And of course, they lead out the propaganda "Don't Steal Books!" and we end up stealing more of them.
:D
Anyways, yeah. Wasn't this ebook software the Skylarov made only able to be used on ebooks that one already owned to port it to a different format? (such as a palm ebook or others?) That's my understanding. And if it's true, what are the damages then?!?! That's fair use! WTF!
Okay. I'm preaching to the choir here. Nevermind.
Oh, and if Adobe sues over peanuts like ebooks, then they need to get to the people that pirate things like Photoshop and Illustrator and Pagemaker and Premiere (which are a helluvalot more likely to be pirated than stupid ebooks, c'mon!)
If, as is suggested, other means of cracking these protected ebooks were used, will the authors of those programs be subject to arrest if they ever visit the US (assuming they are non-US residents)?
Be afraid, be very afraid..
Trolling is a art,
Not to lend weight or support to the perposterous DMCA but I thought the wording was "primary function." If it can be shown that the primary function of the software was simply to give the user their fair use rights to read their own material, how can it be called a circumvention device? In other words, if all it's circumventing is something not recognized by US laws, I don't see what leg they have to stand on. The fact that people did not use the software to violate the contents copyright by distributing the content looks very important, if and only if the DMCA is designed to prevent copyright violation. We all know that the DMCA's primary purpose is to expand the power of and preserve the position of obsolete publishers. Bah, what a stupid law DMCA is.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
As quoted from the Reuters article (my own emphasis added):
;o)
"Adobe Systems has not been able to find proof that anyone made illegal copies of electronic books using software that could sidestep copyright safeguards in the company's eBook software, an Adobe engineer has testified. "
There's a difference in not finding proof that Elcomsoft's software didn't crack the ebooks and not finding any ebooks that were cracked by it (as the Slashdot article suggests). Sorry to be picky, but the person that wrote the slashdot story was a little sensational in his wording, and I thought there was a big enough difference to mention that.
I can understand how unbelievably hard it would be to find proof of cracking with Elcomsoft's software just by downloading cracked ebooks. I doubt Elcomsoft's software leaves any footprints in the decoded file, especially considering the extremely simplistic 'encryption' algorithm
Remember the EULA for the new media player? Remember the XP EULA? Big Bill knows who's been naughty and who's been nice because the all agreed to let him look. Perhaps he sold the information and all those craced Ebooks from user's computers to Adobe. Just a wild freaking guese. I'm sure law enfocement officials who've been busting warez rings have plenty of cracked ebooks, but the Bill snoop could and will happen if all goes accoriding to Bill.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I doubt Adobe is concerned about the actual pirated e-books. They're not protecting "peanuts" like e-books versus the more expensive Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. They're protecting the validity and usefulness of their ebook technology - I am not very familiar with it, but it stands to reason that if it becomes extremely easy to circumvent, publishers won't even think about using it to "securely" distribute e-texts, Adobe won't get paid, and they'll basically be left with a technology they spent a lot of money on that no one wants to use.
That is very different from Adobe worrying about some 14-year-old downloading the latest Photoshop. They're probably smart enough to realize that they're generally not losing sales revenue through that, they are, if anything, gaining market share by having a growing self-trained user base (which in turn leads to businesses hiring the 14-year-old a few years down the road and buying another legit license).
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
This is strange... on the surface, I'd like to think that this is bad news for Adobe... but something tells me that this is bad news for Elcomsoft because news is out that their product doesn't work.
Although, does anybody actually steal e-books? I don't seem to recall "e-books" as a hot ticket item all the 1337 kiddiez want.
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All depends whether or not you've been exposed to the Slashdot/EFF propaganda or the CBS/Disney propaganda. If you ask the average Joe if they think cracking tools should be illegal, they're probably going to tell you yes, they should. If you phrase it a little differently, and ask them if they should be allowed to listen to their CDs in their car, then they're going to answer differently.
Now if you're an honest politician, you're going to try to make a law which makes cracking tools illegal but still allows people to listen to their music in any place at any time they want. But it's in that nitty gritty lawyer stuff that the corporations have the most power.
Finally, look at it from the perspective of the average person. Most of us aren't selling or using software cracks, whether for legitimate or illegitimate purposes. And even those of us who only use cracks, and don't sell them, in reality there's about 0.000000% chance we're going to get caught.
And according to The USA post DMCA, you're guilty unless and until you can prove yourself innocent! The fact that something hasn't been used to break the law doesn't mean that it CAN'T be used in that way. So by doing a pre-emptive strike, the Govt. can make sure that it never will be used to break the law. Get it?
bottom line, adobe is more interested in getting design houses to fork over the cash, than prosecuting people with pimples.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
there's a suprising number of girls in college who use photoshop to crop/resize their digital photos, because they ask their friends "what should i download to fix my pictures?" and about 3 minutes later they have one of the 5 cd's floating about the dorm floor with photoshop 6 or 7 on it, and in another 20 min, have it installed. but you're right, the same thing happens, except with men, and at the office. people aren't willing to pay $600 for any photo program, because at most the average user will never spend more than 4 hours using a photo editing program, limiting any program of the genre's value significantly. i wonder, would adobe be doing better or worse if they marketed the gimp for windows as a free alternative to photoshop, so it wouldn't "eat into their potential marketshare", although that sounds highly counter-productive.
moox. for a new generation.
I know that I would never even consider buying an ebook for the simple reason that I can't print it out if I want to. I have never even seen ebooks on sale in any large numbers and the famed electronic book craze of a few years back (Microsoft, Adobe and another company all making proprietry standards) has completely dried up. I cannot find electronic book readers in most stores anymore and adobe's ebook reader has got to be one of the less popular downloads around today.
Being a normal human being I believe that I own something when I buy it. Everything else I consider as rent. Strange laws might call it DMCA or licence but I consider it rent. Since a real book doesn't cost all that much more than most of these books, I reckon most people would go for the real paper version.
Not only that but I fear that Orwell's 1984 and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 are becoming more and more real all the time. When will the thought police come to my house to burn my books? Is there a difference between that and the taleban?
I don't think that is a defence:
The anti-cirumvention software was working just fine at the time that the
alleged offense was committed. It was only after it was cracked that it became
(effectively) obsolete.
That's like saying "But Officer - I didn't break into this house - the
front door was wide open...right after I smashed the lock."
Dimitiri's defense (IMHO) is twofold - firstly, he did all this in Russia
where it isn't illegal - secondly that he did it to aid disabled people to
read eBooks and not to help the pirating of eBooks.
The whole "to help blind people" thing seems to me to be the linchpin here.
If Adobe had picked some cracker who lived in the USA - and who had personally
pirated a bunch of books using their own cracking tools - Adobe would have
a much stronger case.
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