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Adobe's ADEPT DRM Broken
An anonymous reader writes "I love cabbages has reverse-engineered Adobe's ADEPT DRM (e-book protection). On February 18, I love cabbages released code that decrypts EPUB e-books protected with ADEPT and followed that up on February 25, with code that decrypts PDF e-books protected with ADEPT. On March 4, I love cabbages was given a DMCA take down notice. And there's plenty of evidence he got it right. DS:TNG (Dmitry Sklyarov: The Next Generation)?"
"Copyright law" does not equal "technological enforcement of whatever terms somebody feels like enforcing".
While some DRM-crackers are indeed, more or less unrelated(you don't see GPL proponents celebrating the availability of cracked copies of proprietary software), the DRM-crackers who stand up for our freedom to own and control our computers, rather than the other way around, have pretty much exactly the same objective as core GPL proponents.
The GPL is an additive license. You don't loose the right to do anything under it, you gain the right to do things you weren't otherwise allowed if you follow it.
The DRM license an eBook is published under is subtractive, you don't gain anything from the license that your money hasn't already purchased. The sole point of the license is to force you to give up rights 'in favor' of the rights holder position.
Apples and Oranges my friend.
When you come up with a DRM backed license that at leasst actually gives, in exchange for what it's taking, something of value, then you might have an arguement. Till then, when I purchase a book, I expect to be able to use it. And since the law explicitly allows circumvention of DRM for the purposes of interoptability, I'd say so does the law.
Right.
The problem is that the Entertainment/Industrial Complex believes there's a lot more money in the safe than there really is.
The "Sita Sings the Blues" case proves that. Somebody thought that the intellectual "property" of a handful of songs from the 1930's was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were wrong.
So they take their anger out on "I love cabbages" and The Pirate Bay. It's futile, but try telling that to someone who's enraged that the "Rolex" they bought was really a fugazi.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Wow, all the trolls have come out of the woodwork.
What makes you think people are going to stop creating works of art just because somebody else is going to copy them? What makes you think that people are going to stop singing, painting, writing, telling stories, just because somebody else can sing the same song, paint the same picture, write the same words and tell the same stories?
Without copyright, people might not make money out of it. But nobody says people are supposed to make money for everything they do. Making money is not a right.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Far worse for them, unlike the safe, anyone can take a 'crack' at it with no risk whatsoever. Nobody ever got carted off to jail because they were discovered cracking the DRM on Monday morning. You have as long as you care to spend to crack it.
For some, the entertainment value of cracking the DRM (think of it as a puzzle) far exceeds the value (to them) of the content. Then, of course, there's the value of being recognized as an 'uber hacker' if you're the first to crack it. The harder the DRM is, the greater that value is.
Because of that, weaker DRM might actually keep the content locked up longer (I believe that's what you're getting at by releasing DRM with an exploit). That certainly would reduce the entertainment value of finding a second way in.