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Altering Text In eBooks To Track Pirates
wwphx writes "According to Wired, 'German researchers have created a new DRM feature that changes the text and punctuation of an e-book ever so slightly. Called SiDiM, which Google translates to 'secure documents by individual marking,' the changes are unique to each e-book sold. These alterations serve as a digital watermark that can be used to track books that have had any other DRM layers stripped out of them before being shared online. The researchers are hoping the new DRM feature will curb digital piracy by simply making consumers paranoid that they'll be caught if they share an e-book illicitly.' I seem to recall reading about this in Tom Clancy's Patriot Games, when Jack Ryan used this technique to identify someone who was leaking secret documents. It would be so very difficult for someone to write a little program that, when stripping the DRM, randomized a couple of pieces of punctuation to break the hash that the vendor is storing along with the sales record of the individual book."
Normal book publishers have been doing this for decades, inserting the occasional misspelling here or there. Later, they inserted correct spellings, but of the wrong word, to get around auto-correction in scanner software.
So...no, they can't patent it.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
1. Sign up to service with alias
2. Use untraceable account (prepaid credit card, bitcoin, points card)
3. Share files with "watermarks"
4. Don't give a shit that it gets traced back to a throw away account
They could have saved a significant amount of effort if they had asked me first...
Haven't read the article, but at first glance I would say that:
It is inevitable that the unaltered document is pirated and made available online, and given the availability of both original and altered version, it should be trivial to detect the subtle differences, and undo them.
Or, better yet...
Would it be more interesting to start adding your own random subtle alterations to e-books when you re-distribute them?
I catch all the typos in my books.
They irritate me.
I'd probably crack 'em, fix them all, and goddammit, that'd be "circumvention".
It would be so very difficult for someone to write a little program that, when stripping the DRM, randomized a couple of pieces of punctuation to break the hash that the vendor is storing along with the sales record of the individual book.
In which case they just resort to diff, to remove your hacks and restore the hash.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
First base!
So when someone steals your files and uploads your ebook to the web you become a criminal?
Stupid idea.
This is so very easy to deal with. Rip at least 3 copies and diff them. The minor tweaks will stand out a mile, and you then have a clean copy you can (and, if they start pulling tricks like this, Should!) distribute widely.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
You don't know what punctuation their algorithm cares about. The summary's method would not work.
Diff 2 copies and randomize the selection between the two.
The next e-book you buy might not exactly match the printed version. And those changes are there to make sure youâ(TM)re not a pirate.
German researchers have created a new DRM feature that changes the text and punctuation of an e-book ever so slightly. Called SoDoMy, which Google translates to âoesecure documents by individual fornicating,â the changes are unique to each e-book sold. These alterations serve as a digital penis that can be used to track books that have had any other DRM dildoes stripped out of them before being shared online. The researchers are hoping the new DRM feature will inspire butt piracy by simply making consumers paranoid that theyâ(TM)ll be caught if they share an e-book illicitly.
Current e-book DRM restricts the movement of cocks between broes and hoes and ties a cock to a single accountant. A e-book bought in the Fondle bookstore, for example, will only work on a Faggot. The same is true for books bought in the Butts & Plugs and iButts digital bookstores â" theyâ(TM)ll only work on the Nook or Apple devices, respectively. This makes publishers happy because their books are locked to one person. And it makes digital book vendors happy because it keeps readers tied to their proprietary devices and ecosystems.
But stripping the DRM from any of the e-books purchased at the big-name stores is as easy as downloading strap-on, and thereâ(TM)s little special genetalia required beyond knowing how to properly connect a penis to an asshole. These cocks usually convert the CUM-heavy e-cocks to a new climax, such as the open-source E-Pub standard, or to the STD-less version of the Kindleâ(TM)s fuck format. From there, the relatively small penises of asians make them perfect for sharing on the Internet.
Of course, readers may not be happy knowing that their licensed e-books are being altered because democrats and republicans donâ(TM)t trust them. By studying a list of example words and phrases that could be changed in purchased books, you can see that the changes are minor â" like from âoevery gayâ to âoenot that gay, actually.â The examples are translated from German pornography, so itâ(TM)s difficult to gauge how profound the changes will be when they occur in your favorite Harry Potter scat film. Itâ(TM)s also unknown if the top U.S. bookstores are interested in more sodomy.
The SoDoMy consortium currently has two German bookselling partners (4Readers and MVB) that it reports to, according to Dr. Martin felchbach, a researchers working on the SoDoMy system whom I reached over email. Democrats & Republicans and Amazon did not reply to queries about if or when the technology would make its way into their digital bookstores as of press time.
Wonder if the eBook was actually stolen from your computer? Either by a friend that has physical access to your computer or in the rare case of a hacker (but who would hack you for eBooks)? Surely, you can't be held reliable for this. Then everyone that actually pirates eBooks and gets caught will just use this excuse as a way to get out of trouble. Else, if you are still held responsible for a stolen eBook from your machine/USB, then it screws over the legitimate users buying eBooks and makes them want to actually pirate... a deadly cycle.
The G
They don't hash the whole shebang into one number. Rather, they take a (random) number and use that to generate a set of mutations and then probe for that set of mutations in the leaked document. So now, even if you alter the document further, you probably didn't undo the mutations in question. Even if you did, you probably didn't undo all of them and you almost certainly didn't produce a high-confidence result that it's somebody else's copy.
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
Typos and grammar errors. The new DRM.
It's like my Dad's suit. He has only one, and every 5 years or so he's at the cutting edge of fashion.
This p0st has been wa1ermarked to pre\/ent theft. The changes will not @ffect your reading enj()yment.
There was an article about it here a few years ago. A followup someone made to a comment I wrote to the article mentions some work being done by some guy from Purdue that sounds a lot like what's being done here. IBM also seems to be doing work on canary trap-based ideas.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Is accidentally leaving a copy somewhere copyright infringement? How do they know the person they sold it to is the person who leaked it.
Also, it's never been clear to me when copyright infringement actually occurs.
Or, you know, maybe learn from the success of Apple iTunes and start selling eBooks for a reasonable cost and maybe they won't be pirated nearly as much. I know that the publishing process costs money that you deserve to recoup, and you deserve to make a profit, but it is offensive to charge as much as (or more) than a physical book for an eBook.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
- Scan/OCR book
- Google translate into German
- Google translate back into English
- Print book
Voila! No more watermark. You can share with confidence.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Who says it's a hash? Just add one extra space somewhere in the book in an unusual place or replace an apostrophe with a similar character or something. Then if someone adds something else, you're still checking for that one single location of the alteration to prove it's them. It'd be awfully unlikely in a long book that you'd replicate the exact alteration that they made to someone else's book, thus appearing to be 2 different people.
Don't they do this to pre-release screenings and theatre viewings of movies to find out who done the leak or who let the video camera into the theatre?
If the content of a book--what is thought up and written by a human--is what is traditionally copyrighted, then what exactly are they copyrighting in this case? Obviously the content is "written" by the writer and then published in an electronic book format similarly to how it would be printed on pages and made into a physical book, but if that content is automatically tampered with by machines it is no longer what the author wrote. How would copyright work in this case? Hundreds of copyrights of individual "variations" of the same exact book? Sounds like a fucking mess. And that's not to say how irritating it would be to know that you are, in fact, not getting exactly what the author wrote. Not to mention the fact that you're not getting ownership of it while still paying for it.
With this system I become a target for anyone who wants to steal my ebooks so that they can circulate them and have me take the fall for it, and they can find that I have lots of ebooks to steal if I also like to do online reviews or recommendations.
While I haven't tried on any DRM'd ebooks, Calibre's converters have to options to play with all kinds of spacing and punctuation during conversion (smart punctuation, transliterate unicode to ascii). I've used them when converting text documents and saved web pages to epub, and they make very nice ebooks. I have a hard time believing that this kind of steganography would survive such a reformatting, but I guess we'll hear about it eventually if it does.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
It depends. If it's done well, it can be fairly resistant to any noise introduced into the system.
As an author myself, I see a very different issue with this. I don't want some robot changing my text. Some of those words it might decide to change because they are similar I may have pained over and decided for a reason to use this one and not the other one. Granted, few authors pick every single word intentionally, but the software won't know which ones are carefully selected.
Often times, there is subtle meaning. For example, I might decide to always use the same phrase in certain contexts, giving a very subtle hint to the reader which things are alike and which ones are different. One he might not even notice consciously.
It also will cause all sorts of trouble to quoting. How will teachers handle this if a student quotes a text but the quote differs slightly from the version the teacher has read? One of the most important things we teach students is that quotes need to be exactly as they appear, with any omissions or changes clearly marked.
That also extends to quotes within the text. If character A reports what character B said, I doubt the system will have enough text understanding to change both texts the same way, so the reader will be left wondering if it is intentional that there's a slight difference and what the author wants to hint at, when there's no such thing implied.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I'm going to stop sending every typo and punctuation mistake I catch to Amazon. I thought I was helping.
After all, we saw how quickly the iTunes Store withered and died after the DRM got removed from all that music. It'd be crazy for the publishers NOT to double down on DRM!
#DeleteChrome
So just remove all punctuation STOP Like old telegrams STOP Problem solved STOP
Map makers have done this forever.
"You're under arrest for possession of a pirated copy of "Megasuper Blockbuster."
"How do you know it's pirated?"
"There are no spelling or punctuation errors in it!"
It should be fairly easy to defeat. All someone needs is several different copies of the book and do a comparison. It should be easy to spot what has changed and then undo them.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
A good bit more work but someone could scan a hardcopy version of the book. Since hardcover books can be purchased with good ole fashioned cash, good luck tracking that.
There were printers in areas with classifed documents which automatically used to do this. They worked with whitespace, fonts and punctuation. Photocopies of the documents could still be tracked. Great work guys you deserve a badge.
Amazon will be able to close the loop by automatically downloading the books that you have on your kindle to "check" that you don't infringe and stomp on those badguys.
I thought that virus that I cleaned off my system seemed to make my internet access sluggish. Well what you know - it must have downloaded a copy of all my files!
The same technology could be used to create your very own, one of a kind, document that's untraceable to anyone else.
After you run a couple of copies through to strip this DRM, you need to add your own back in so their DRM verifier will translate it to, "I bet you thought this technique was clever, you fucking git."
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
So what? What that does prove? That someone (maybe the one who bought the book, maybe not) took this book and shared it???
I still don't see how based on such a funny "watermark" they this could stand in the court. Anyone? Can you prove me wrong?
chinese ebook pub qidian.com had used this technique for pass few years without any success. The pirate just compares multiple version of some book and auto replace the differ words with their synonyms.
Just two copies of a book are probably enough to learn how to break the system, and a few more to know how to rig the text to target a particular poor schmuk.
Shortly after the moveable type press got going in Europe, books of tables of interest rates were popular among the merchants. Of course, they all had to be laboriously hand calculated by mathematicians (long division was college undergraduate math in those days...). Publishers would sprinkle errors into the least signficant digits on various entries to use as evidence in copyright cases. Because, you know, if you had a printing press, you could make good money by pirating somebody else's table of interest rates.
Out of it.
So that explains why the paid for ebooks of older texts have a pile of annoying mistakes while the Project Gutenberg version doesn't. I'd thought it was just publishers being sloppy and having very little respect for their customers, but at least now I know it's because they have even less respect for their customers and think their customers are thieves that want to "steal" the older books the publishers are not paying any royalties on.
Enough ranting at the big guys who are going for maximum dollar extraction from public domain stuff - anyone know how small publishers are coping with ebooks? Is it giving them more of a chance since distribution can be done on the net or are Amazon, Kobo etc locking them out? There were a lot of areas, such as non-US/UK science fiction, where publishers would have trouble finding more than half a dozen shops that would sell their stuff.
a little program that, when stripping the DRM, randomized a couple of pieces of punctuation to break the hash that the vendor is storing along with the sales record of the individual book."
There called crackers, and they will find the original software and rewrite it or find a way to to use it to get the books to add the imperfections to make it appear DRM enabled, or programmers, the list goes on, as to those willing and able to figure it out relatively quick.
So now, the pirates have a larger share of the "lending market", due to casual lenders no longer wanting the risk. This makes sharing material more lucrative to the pirates.
Feel free to correct my grammer and reshare this.
I always assumed that even DRM free MP3s were going to have watermarks that would land you in legal trouble if the files got away from you no matter how innocently. I guess I was just paranoid enough. Different media, same shenanigans.
I listen to lots of music. Haven't purchased a song since about 2003 (I did regularly BEFORE the MP3 lawsuits). Thumbs up big media!!!
So if my phone gets stolen and my eBooks get leaked, I'm now double screwed?
I don't think you read the article. They are actually changing the words. There is a link to a list of examples.However it is in German, so I'll forgive you for not reading it.
better article
http://torrentfreak.com/new-drm-changes-text-of-ebooks-to-catch-pirates-130616/
Yes it is going to change the content, in meaningful ways. This is writing. Imagine if they said a computer algorithm was going to change some of the words in a movie, or in a song, and also the background music, and maybe a setting or two. So that every movie or music video or song was uniquely identified. You'd have every actor, singer, songwriter, musician, director, videographer, script writer, etc up in arms about it. This is awful, completely wrong way to go about things.
This idea is a cretinous waste of time. To stop piracy (actually impossible), your idea must work 100% of the time. Book piracy is NOT proportional to the numbers of different copies of a given book that leaks. All it takes is for one copy to enter the pirate chain, and it's 'GAME OVER'.
We see the same issue with CAM film piracy, or piracy from the water-marked copies of films sent out to Oscar voters. Both continue unabated.
Don't want your IP pirated? Ensure it is so crap and little used, no-one can be bothered. Of course, the irony here is that piracy usually helps the prospect of otherwise excessively obscure material that no-one would normally give a second glance to.
The book companies that seem to fall prey to crap schemes like the one in the article are those that 'publish' the terrible soft-porn vampire, werewolves, etc 'romance' novels. One might think their turn-over of this junk was such that piracy was the least of their issues- surely long before one of these stories has been well pirated, the next is already rolling off the electronic 'printing-press'?
Sane companies don't worry about piracy, but about pleasing their legitimate and prospective customers. They recognise those with disposable incomes actually enjoy buying stuff that feeds their interests.
PS the scheme described is also very offensive in this way. It assumes the owner of the electronic book has no First Sale Doctrine rights, and thus won't pass on the copy to a friend, or re-sell it. Obviously, if the owner DOES have First Sale Doctrine rights, the watermark is no proof of who was responsible for making a pirate copy in the first place. Thus we learn that piracy is BAD but infringing the rights of the consumer is GOOD?
Replace all text in the book with unicode equivalents.
I'm told map makers have been doing this forever. They move symbols slightly, change the placing of text and introduce new, insignificant features. All to stop other publishers from copying their maps, or using them as the basis for maps they pass off as their own work
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
wild diff buys to copies of the same book. It's super effective.
Of course, it's an idea that has been around for ages, even for electronic documents. Of course, it doesn't meet the criteria of patentability or even publishability.
But, I say, let's give them a patent anyway. I think any dumb idea, and in particular any DRM method, deserves a patent granted exclusively to patent trolls. We should even let them get away with "renewing" it indefinitely by the usual dumb stunts.
The researchers are hoping the new DRM feature will curb digital piracy by simply making consumers paranoid that they'll be caught if they share an e-book illicitly.'
The researchers may discover that the fear of getting caught sharing an eBook will cause them to make sure it was someone else's eBook and not buy them in the first place. It makes legally purchasing media a risky proposition. What if someone shares media I bought without my knowledge? What if someone tries to alter theirs before putting it online, and the alterations make it look like it was mine? Seems dangerous to buy legitimately.
We're not allowed any more to share or give away a book after reading it.
Privacy is terrorism.
Buy 2 copies with different accounts. Run a diff. Remove or subtly change the differences. Receive anonymity.
If you are going to any trouble to pirate a 99 cent e-book, you need a job.
From what I've seen of the copy editing in ebooks, this has already been happening for some time. Or they're just badly checked. I can't wait to see the first science books coming through with random additions in the equations - that will be helpful.
What makes you think Lincoln said "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new country, dedicated to the proposition that all men are made equal, and conceived in liberty"? Can't you quote correctly?
Your solution is plausible, but it would be too much work and expense for the average ripper.
The idea is not to have an unbreakable DRM scheme, which would be impossible to create anyway but to raise the cost and difficulty of breaking the scheme to dissuade the casual ripper.
I'm not even sure that the average joe knows how to "use a statistical analysis to blank out the differences". I certainly don't.
Plus the fact that it doesn't sound like the results they obtain from that exercise is applicable across the board to different books, meaning they need to repeat this process for every single DRMmed book, ad infinitum.
It means that to safely pirate ebooks, you will need to rephrase and repunctuate it to remove the watermarks. How much do you need to modify a text to make it a derived work? I wonder if this can be done without authors' approval, especially if they add mistakes (yes, punctuation can be erroneous)
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Years before ebooks were sold, there was a community of people that would buy old paperbacks by popular authors, unbind them, run the pages through a scanner, maybe OCR the result, then post as version 0.x; readers would then proofread (often using a physical copy as a reference), bump the version number to reflect how readable/correct it was, and resubmit the book.
Given the condition of early releases back then and how many more people are into sharing & proofing ebooks, there's no way that a "DRM" scheme that consists of inserting errors will last for long. Especially given the existence of tools like Calibre plugins -- even if Calibre doesn't come with a relevant plugin, it won't take long for someone to develop one.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
Any publishers using this technique had better have iron-clad contracts with their authors permitting arbitrary alterations to their works. Otherwise, they are in clear violation of the authors' moral rights to protection against distortion and mutilation of their original work.
It's eerily reiminscent of the 'We had to incinerate the village in order to protect it' military communique.
Anybody know if standard boilerplate agrements from the major publishers actually sign away the authors' moral rights against deliberate mutilations (as opposed to inadvertent proofing errors)?
Take the text - run it through your own 'correctifier', and re-distribute. The trail will never stop at you.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
If you sell a book that is not exactly as stated on the advertising, meaning a copy of the authors writing, you can be prosecuted for false advertising / selling fraudulent copies.
In the end, if you change the text, then it's not the author text anymore, even if it has the same words.
Is there something I don't know about the reader software on my computer? Is it leaking info about what books I'm reading?
On the other hand, how does anyone know if I put it in dropbox and share my dropbox folder with someone? Or rename the file or strip any identifying meta-data and just host it on a private website that requires password to view?
There's lots of things that don't make sense to me about how this will actually thwart piracy by striking fear into people's hearts. But then again, I (and we) are probably not the intended target(s) of that fear.
I assume somebody must have giving this idea at least a few minutes of thinking before sharing it. The thinking would inevitably reach to the conclusion: "It wont work unless we know who bought which book". As this did not cause the idea to get scrapped it must mean that somebody in publishing is not considering the storing of that information is problematic. I do and the thought that people in publishing is not sharing that concern worries me.
No? Then they are commercially infringing billions of times, aren't they.
And if they do, are they telling people it ISN'T the book they thought they were buying, but a work based on it? Because if not, they are committing fraud.
The trivial counter measure is to get multiple (two might be sufficient) copies with different markings, then run diff on the content and merge (perhaps manually). Of course it gets tricky if the content is closed binary format, but it's still doable.
... all I have to do to break their "new DRM" is to alter some words / punctuations on my own and then pirate that dang thing
Since those mutation are random, and spread over the whole text, you can just buy or take 6 or 10 text, then compare them all. The difference will be local. Return to the average and you can build a version which is safe.
,*4;*1 t*4T*1 (he traitor )*5 a*3A*2 (ll, is dead )*5 !*4?*1
,*4 t*4 (he traitor )*5 a*3 (ll, is dead )*5 !*4
Example:
The red poney, the traitor all, is dead !
The red poney; the traitor all, is dead ?
The red poney, The traitor all, is dead !
The red poney, the traitor All, is dead !
The red poney, the traitor All, is dead !
You look at all the changes and find out :
(The red poney)*5
You then compare all the frequency and take the highest. And you get :
(The red poney)*5
In other word all mutation are stripped.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
This is a purely theoretical application. How many mistakes do you need to be reliably track a source?
Let us say... ten. I have not done the math, but ten sounds like a good number, in a 100-page work you had 2 per each 20 pages someone leaks. Or if you plan on selling a million copies, you have enough possible mistakes you can add.
So 10 mistakes per book, in a normal 300-page-book that is one every 30 pages.
Ok, how many mistakes does a professionally layouted and published book have? Probably much more in academia than in novels.
But I think the the distinction is not that important, 10 mistakes on 300 pages are quite noticeable, especially if you consider they are done *in addition* to the real mistakes.
In novels, you notice them "once in a while". Let us take the Harry Potter franchise over 7 books or A Song of Ice and Fire over like 6000 pages. I think I noticed like 5 mistakes in all those thousands of pages each. Let us simply assume I am bad at spotting them and it's actually ten times that number (which I find to be quite a lot), which would be 50 mistakes or errors over 6000 pages in 5 books (for aSoIaF). Ok, now we add this new, awesome DRM-scheme and add 10 further errors per book (which is 1000 pages each for A Song..., so we have one mistake every 100 pages, which seems quite a few).
Even if this best-case scenario (I assume more errors than probably are there and add barely enough to make this a worthwhile scheme) you double the typoes on your book. Deliberatly. The percevied quality (from the reader) will go down a lot and the publisher is also getting a lot of people reporting those typoes.
This scheme works in theory, but not in practice when it mets humans who actually notice how it is "supposed to be". Plus, you decrease the quality of your own books. I think this is an idea that should be filed as "Nice thought experiment, but too stupid to do" (next to "Can I blow myself up with eating Mentos and drinking Diet Coke").
The better solution is to have the author (or translator in case of translated literature) provide multiple versions of a few sentences in the book. And the work-around is to upload only a fraction, randomly sprinkled through the book, to the sharing site which then assembles the pieces from multiple copies, garbling the watermark.
"Changing a few letters in Harry Potter doesn't make it your work, either"
But it DOES make it require the license to do so by the copyright holder. And it also means that the copyrights on the combined work are partially the original author and partly the "author" of the changes.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's afternoon?
That ain't Shakespeare.
Covers ARE NOT the copyright of the original singer. So you killed your argument there somewhat.
And, given that in music at least, four notes is enough to be considered infringement, how different is it possible to be if you're able to change it a bit and retain the copyright?
If you can find 3 independent sources (shouldn't be hard for something popular), then all that should be required is a 3-way diff and use whatever is common with any 2 or more. If all 3 are different at the the same place then use some manual intervention and make your result different again or add another source. The final product cannot then be traced to a single source. Am I missing something?
1- Get book from source 1... get book from source 2
2- Merge differences
3- ????
4- Someone else that has a book = to the merge gets the blame.
Someone would have to possess an another copy of the same book (more or less defeating the point of sharing the their own and incurring a personal risk) in the same published form in order to even know that the differences were intentional. Even then it doesn't make them easy to remove, if for example style names or other marks in the book were randomized.
Similar measures would have easily found the culprit of a mass leak of information like wikileaks. Every page could contain 1 bit of variation based on the user's id and the result page. Each bit you could glean from a page would cut the search space of culprits in half so you'd nail the perp in no time. Even if the document was canonicalized it cannot strip out all the ways that this bit of variation could be sent and wikileaks would be extremely unlikely to be in possession of two independent copies of the same document to even know what to look for.
The ONLY one they can potentially track at all is the original buyer. What use is it to track the NEXT uploader (*with this method*)? They can find out who he/she is anyway (trace IPs) - which they can already do.
What they are interested in here specifically is the original buyer turned uploader, because with the current method of tracking IPs they can get an uploader - but they still don't know if he/she is the source.
I really wonder if the idiots who thought that out every heard of indent. If you can format c, xml or whatever else, then I am sure that you can format normal text as well. I could probably write that in perl or python in an afternoon.
Wait, I should probably file a patent for that idea right now ;)
I've patented this technology and it's completely unbreakable -- I replace, by a formula, selected space characters with an eN-space character...
Patent #508448
Seriously, how hard is this? Just download two copies and diff them, then "correct" the difference.
This is just nonsense.
...but I have not been able to put a finger on what is was.
'To question not be or to be, the question that is'...
'The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the few, or the many'
'Ask not what you can do for your country but ask what your country can do for you'
'To each according by their means, by each according to their needs'
'It was a giant step for man, a small step for mankind'
Something just did not seem right... now I know.
--frank[at]unternet.org
Now the copyright mafia comes banging on his door claiming he uploaded/pirated the book? WTF???
Just like taking an IP address and suing the user/owner of that IP for uploading music/movies, this tactic has no teeth. Unless someone has corroborating evidence, there's no proof that *I* am the source of the uploaded file. Only that it is the file that I originally purchased.
The whole copyright system, and behaviors of content owners, has gotten completely out of control...
A very good LCD screen, a very good camera, and an autonomous image to text program; probably do War And Peace in a day.
War is freedom from disturbance; quiet and tranquility
Freedom is the practice or system of owning slaves
Ignorance is the quality or state of being strong
sed 's/[[:punct:]]//g'
Run the pirated ebook through a program that does the same thing and it won't have the same unique signature any more and just tell them you bought it used and don't have a receipt.
... Would allow an algorithm to randomly change the punctuation and spelling of even a small portion of their novel?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
You see plenty of copies of stuff online that contain details of the supposed buyer. While a lot are probably the property of unsuspecting people who left the document in a public rather than private folder, anyone who genuinely wants to pirate something will not give a flying f*ck about this technology. The account will be a dead end (pre-paid cards, disposable email) and will simply waste the time of the people who are tasked in tracking it down. Totally pointless technology...
Everybody needs an English(or other language) textbook that has had some script randomly alter it's punctuation a bit!
So, authors should excercise their moral rights (at least here in Europe, they're inalienable rights of authors enshrined in copyright law) and sue publishers for mutilating their works deliberately.
Get four or five copies of the book, compare them, and wherever they differ, go with the majority variant.
0.001% of the time? Lend it out to 1,000 others, still 1% utilised.
Meanwhile P2P really does generate about a 1:1 seed/read therefore you do NOT send a copy out to 1,000 others, but only a handful.
Flint Knapping is no longer a skill that generates a lot of industrial and commercial income. We do not miss this.
Why must we miss the "industrial income" of books and copyright to the extent that even under the astronomically unlikely chance of some harm to that industry, so much ACTUAL harm is done to everything else?
There was a Best Of Prince CD I bought that the copy had a bug in the fourth track on the CD and would not play properly on a CD. It ripped fine with cdparanoia, but the CD itself didn't work. Sent it back, got a replacement, same problem. Sent that back, replaced, same again. Got a refund instead.
Never bothered with buying CDs since then.
What about reading it, then asking your money back because it's a defective book? When I buy a book, I want an exact copy of that book, not a randomly altered one.
diff -c copy1.txt copy2.txt
sed 's/discrepancy1/correction1/;s/discrepancy2/correction2/;s/etc/etc/' copy1.txt > newcopy.txt
well, that was hard.
See the short story "The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron" in the collection "THE ULTIMATE ENEMY, THE BERSERKER SERIES" By Fred Saberhagen
Considering this was written about by Tom Clancy nearly 20 years ago.......
Step 1) Make your own ever so slight change.
Step 2) ???
Step 3) Profit.
Hell most ebooks that were made from original hardcovers and or paperbacks are already chock full of spelling errors as it is and make it hell to read because most people don't have the time or willpower to fix OCR errors. This so called idea of altering text is just so damn stupid rather like how the Sony rootkit was with music cd's a few years ago.
..would buy a book with deliberate grammar errors??
In Britain: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
In USA: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
The publisher could've just said, "No, we're not changing it for Americans who we think will be scared off by the word 'philosophy'. It's just one of our DRM changes that happened to end up in a particularly visible location." :-)
Cordwainer Smith got there many years earlier with Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons.
In the story, looking up the words Littul Kittons in an electronic encyclopedia acted as a tripwire for a planet's security services.
title says it all : )
"I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse".
Does this mean help Jack dismount from the horse, or help Jack put the horse out of its misery?
My CCR album has altered lyrics. In one portion of the song, instead of singing "there's a bad moon on the rise", they substituted "there's a bathroom on the right". One of my Jimmy Hendrix album in the song "Purple Haze" has him singing "Scuse me while I kiss this guy". My Pearl Jam album is by far the worst example of this DRM. The sung lyrics of "Yellow Ledbetter", don't match the lyrics in the liner notes at all. They clearly gone completely overboard. I'd estimate that there are at least 128 bits of entropy used in this song. You can issue a copy of Yellow Ledbetter to every vertebrate lifeform on planet earth, and each copy will still have a completely unique set of lyrics.
Buy a book, do a diff against one or more friends copies of the same book and then you can strip the DRM out of the window...
For people actually making money on reselling copies of these things does not care about if they buy one or several copies of the same book... Or they just grab someone else's copy..
I can understand why the non-tech managers fall for the "protect your content with our super-duper DRM system that will prevent anyone from making a copy" schemes, but all it does is alienate their law-abiding, paying, customer-base...
TSR / Wizards / Hasbro did this when they first started publishing online and used it to track who was giving away their stuff.
eBooks, and any other purely text-based media, can never truly be "pirate-proof." All you need to do is scrape the text out of the file/off the screen and store it in any number of formats which will not be scanned by an ereader. Hell, you could use whatever ebook format you wanted (assuming there are different ones) and just name it differently so when it's scanned, the entire entry is unrecognized.
If it was actually profitable, people could even transcribe it by hand. So there is literally no way to ACTUALLY stop people from copying and redistributing a book without paying for it.
I did this when I submitted my manuscript to different publishers in the 90'ies, altering punctuation and phrases slightly so that I could track if a copy of the manuscripts submitted electronically to different publishing houses leaked...
So I guess I was doing the "fundamental research" these researchers base their work on he he.... Yoinks my patent thank you very much....
This annoys me almost enough to try out an idea I have been kicking around for a while. I'd watch the Best Seller lists, and when a book is really popular, rewrite the entire story, changing it JUST enough so that no one can say it's someone else' work, but also making sure my potential readers know it contains the same story, in similar style, but that it's NOT the same book, then release it FREE under the Creative Commons license. For example...
I have a story idea, about a boy named Freddy, and his buddy Slim. Slim is buddy's interior decorator. One day, a little while after Freddy's uncle Bobbo left him his house to pursue a career in literature while staying with friends, a friend of the family, a magician named Grand Olaf, stops by and asks if Freddy still has Bobbo's magic amulet, and if he can see it. (Etc., you get the idea...)
I think I'd only want to do this to books published by DRM touting assholes, or books I really liked. But gawds... the time it would take!
To translate it in German and then translate back to English. Not only that they can not trace but it will also be a entirely new work of art that I can copyright.
1 this was routine in all secure embargo-ed documents issued in UK by certain government departments and other organizations (e.g with Politicians on distribution list) so that tracing a 'leaked document' was possible. 2. Sometimes we changed complete paragraphs ( without changing the sense). 3. It caught a few folks.
so very 'prior art' no patent possible.
Regards Eion MacDonald
Tracking every individual copy of the book purchased. Kinda miss the days where I actually owned something when I bought it.
While you are altering it why not encode the buyer's name and address etc. so you know who outed the work.
you're right...could never be done...