Aaron Swartz Ebook's DRM Has Been Cracked (hackaday.com)

Slashdot reader jenningsthecat writes: From Hackaday comes news that the collected writings of Aaron Swartz, released as a watermarked eBook by publishing company Verso Books, has had its watermarking scheme cracked by The Institute for Biblio-Immunology, who also published a guide for removing the BooXtream watermarks.

The writings of Aaron Swartz, with DRM applied? Oh, the irony. Still, at least the DRM employed doesn't restrict a user from reading the book on any and all capable devices, so it's not a very intrusive form of DRM. But I somehow doubt that Mr. Swartz would take any comfort from that...

Comments

Is it irony...

[Anonymous Coward]

if the guy who cracked the e-book gets railroaded to a 50 year sentence and $1 million in fines then kills himself, only to have his writings published in a encrypted e-book, which in turn is ...

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[I'm New Around Here]

And that is why ArmoredDragon is quite correct to rarely comment on the random douchebags deified by mindless slaves in internet forums.

All of us form opinions on many people we never meet in real life. Get over it.

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm posting AC because I just don't want to deal with emails from the Aaron Schwartz fan club.

Yes, the prosecutor was overzealous. No, it did not cause his death, which was an unfortunate consequence of his apparent mental illness. Yet he has become some kind of martyr. Every day, people of color are treated far worse by the legal system than Schwartz could even conceive of, and only in exceptional cases does the media even give a damn. With his dad's money for legal appeals and his white privilege, it would have been a long time if ever that he would have seen a day of jail time.

MIT used to have a very open and liberal policy on accessing journals in its libraries. I visit their libraries frequently because they are great, or at least used to be. Before Schwartz, a visitor (like myself, who is no longer an MIT student) could walk into the library (say the Hayden Science Library, my favorite), connect to their wifi, and gain immediate access to any article in the thousands of journals they subscribe to.

Schwartz could do that too, and indeed he could have eventually have downloaded the million papers that he wanted in order to prove some kind of point, and probably no one would have noticed if he was patient and did it in the normal way. It's just that it would have taken longer. He was impatient and greedy and just couldn't wait. So he put together his downloading bot that didn't bother to wait between downloads thus begging to be noticed by IT; when they clamped down, he played cat-and-mouse by changing his laptop MAC address, and eventually illegally wire-tapped into a server closet for direct high-speed access.

Schwartz ruined what MIT used to offer for everyone. There is no more open access like there used to be. Visitor laptops are now prohibited from accessing subscription journal articles directly. Instead, they must be accessed via one of the half-dozen public terminals, which often have a waiting line. I used to be able to browse through journals for hours from my laptop on an easy chair looking out over the Charles River, occasionally downloading or just reading an article of interest. It was heaven for a science nerd like me. Now I have to carefully note the ones I might be interested in, wait for a public terminal, and download them as efficiently as possible so the guy behind me twiddling his thumbs won't get too annoyed.

Every time I visit the library I remember Schwartz. And curse him.

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[hackwrench]

The motives he had that you cite are good, it is true. His motives weren't pure though. What he was willing to justify in achieving his motives and the way he was willing to go about it aren't the best. There was no good reason for him going it alone. There are plenty of people who believe as he did. In fact, not long after he did what he did, someone discovered their own repository of JSTOR documents.

From the 1st_READ.TXT:

This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most have previously only been made available at high prices through paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19 USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who profit from controlling access to these works. I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.

On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers
from JSTOR.

Academic publishing is an odd system- the authors are not paid for their writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics), and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the authors must even pay the publishers.

And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals, but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.

As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The "publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.

Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would benefit by it.

Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions with outrageous subscription fees.

Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence, when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.

Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents. These particular documents are the h