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."

Comments

Is that legal?

[Anonymous Coward]

For them to be downloading ebooks they don't own?

Re:Is that legal?

[coryboehne]

Is that legal?
For them to be downloading ebooks they don't own?

Disclaimer:IANAL

Actually I don't think that would be legal at all... As a matter of a fact I really hope that they posted a list of the books they downloaded and someone gets pissed that Adobe stole a copy of their book, resulting in a law suit against Adobe for piracy.... Ahh the sweet justice that would be....

In other news...

[ottffssent]

"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.

This may not be all that relevant for the case

[czarneki]

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

Re:This may not be all that relevant for the case

[sylvester]

No, but it gives them the defence that the product has substantial non-infringing use. (Since the product has presumably sold, and thus presumably been used, and no infringing use has been discovered, we are lead (dragged?) to the conclusion that people must be using it for some *gasp* legitimate, fair-use purpose.

-Rob

I wonder...

[Z0mb1eman]

...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.

Just goes to show...

[Penguinoflight]

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?

The "analogue"-ish way

[djkitsch]

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.

WTF?

[be-fan]

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!

Re:WTF?

[Idarubicin]

Having a gun doesn't mean that you are going to kill someone.

Having a program used to steal a companies intellectual property is, uh, stealing. I think the contrast between having a gun that has uses other then killing someone, and having a program that's only use is to steal from a company is quite clear.

First of all, you're changing arguments. I could just throw back, "Having an e-book reader doesn't mean that you're going to infringe Adobe's copyrights." Are those blind people who use this type of software so they can feed unencrypted text to their Braille readers thieves? Ahem. Fair use applies.

Further. A gun is a tool which may be used to kill other human beings. (Many are designed expressly for this purpose.) This is a serious criminal offense--possibly the most serious.

An e-book reader is a tool which may be used to infringe copyright, going beyond the bounds of fair use. (Some software is probably designed for this purpose.) This is a civil offense (DMCA nonsense aside.)

As a society acting through our legislative representatives, we may choose to ban one tool, or both, or neither. Which represents the greater potential harm? Which should be our legislative priority?

Incidental aside: there is an important legal distinction between theft and copyright infringement. It is only through oversimplification to the point of error that the two are equated. Similarly, theft, burglary, and robbery are all legally distinct. Don't get me started on the abuse of the word piracy, which properly involves certain crimes on the high seas. One of the things that makes it difficult to have a calm, rational discussion about intellectual property rights is the frequent, reckless use of emotionally loaded--and inaccurate--terms by zealots on both sides.

EBOOK FACTS

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It just proves...

[DaRiachu]

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.

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!) :D

The article actually reads...

[NathanBFH]

As quoted from the Reuters article (my own emphasis added):

"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 ;o)

Re:It just proves...

[Z0mb1eman]

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).