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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.
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".
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
- 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
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
That's not how dyeing industries work.
You negative attitude is colouring your response.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
No, I said it was music!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.