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

Why are we still talking about this guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the files should have been pubicly available, but it doesn't mean he gets to break into server rooms to get that content.

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

We are talking about him because his case in an example of prosecutorial misconduct and the forced application of intense sentences due to legislation that takes the discretion on sentence length away from the judge

It is about filling our prisons with people who are simply warehoused with no plan on how they are going to be brought back into society, and nobody really noticed until rich white people started getting railroaded by it.

It is a really big deal, and the more the people can be made aware of it and fix the problem, the better it will be for all of us

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[wisnoskij]

The files were publicly available. Which did not stop them form also being available on many other locked down systems like where Aaron found them.

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, this is the case:

"Federal prosecutor Stephen Heymann engaged in prosecutorial misconduct by withholding key evidence from the defense team of Aaron Swartz, the late Internet activist’s legal team alleged in a letter to an internal Justice Department ethics unit."

It is important for people to read about him and his views so that they find common ground and realize that it could just as easily be THEM falling under the thumb of a prosecutor who have been granted sweeping abilities and sentenced to decades in prison by judges whose hands are tied when it comes to sentence lengths.

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?

[DragonTHC]

we're still talking about this guy because he fought to release the collective human knowledge which was locked away by by academic bureaucracy and held for ransom to keep a system alive which rewarded those with money and stifled human innovation through exclusivity of said knowledge. His story will go down in the history books, not as a thief who broke into restricted areas and released restricted content, but as the crusader for freedom of human knowledge that he was.

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[DragonTHC]

I think you must be new around here.

Re: Why are we still talking about this guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

We still talk about him because he was a brilliant technologist. There was no real crime commuted (no loss or injury)

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[Applehu Akbar]

We're still talking about Swartz not because he was in any way heroic, but because the prosecution was so purely evil. The wronged party, JSTOR, quickly lost interest in pressing charges, but the federosairus persisted in being douches anyway, because that's how they are trained to behave.

States' rights are the American equivalent of Brexit.

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?

[I'm New Around Here]

Thanks for noticing. :^)

Actually, I've been on /. since 2001, but forgot the passwords of previous accounts. My first user ID was just below 500,000.

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[hackwrench]

Where would we all be if the response to all forms of prevalent misconduct was "We all do it, get over it?".

Re: Why are we still talking about this guy?

[hackwrench]

No man is an island, nor exists in a vacuum. Next you'll be going around telling random strangers that the reason they don't have unicorns is because they only have themselves to blame.

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[hackwrench]

In order for you to know that they are publicly available, you must know where they are publicly available. So, where are they publicly available.

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[I'm New Around Here]

How is "form[ing] opinions on many people we never meet in real life" considered misconduct?

You make it sound like I'm advocating physical assault.

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[cluening]

Man, you are new around here! :)

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[hackwrench]

So in your first sentence you're telling us you're just like Aaron Swartz. You want to do what you see as a good thing without wanting to deal with the possible negative outcomes.

No, it did not cause his death, but to claim it was not a factor is not dealing with reality. Other people have it far worse should pretty much be only an argument for other people have survived under worse, you can survive too sorts of things. Other people having it worse is not a justification for lesser bad behavior. Your sentence about it has no place in this discussion and just muddys the waters.

Which means that the poor treatment of Aaron Swartz does not justify his poor behavior leading up to his treatment. Yes, that's what he should have done. However, the way they treated him was improper and partially at fault for his death. His response to their treatment of him by killing himself is improper. The way his parents raised him to be so bothered by the way he was treated is partially at fault, too. We should be looking for more precursors to the situation, not less.

I don't buy for a minute that the fault for the change of policy at MIT can be all laid at the feet of Aaron Swartz. JSTOR had probably been pushing for tighter restrictions on the documents they offered before the Aaron Swartz incident. Was it additional leverage? Yes. But there have been any number of other things involved in the decision. Again we should be looking for more precursors.

But this time instead of saying that something isn't at fault, you are committing the mistake of saying something is the only thing to blame, and not even the people with agency involved. Why are you so quick to blame only Aaron when it comes to his death, but so quick to absolve MIT of everything when it made a decision?

That's what situations like the one surrounding Aaron Swartz is for me. Not about making him a hero, or vilifying him but speaking out against people like you who basically want the same things as Aaron Swartz, but don't realize that's what they are doing, people like you who want to make things all or nothing, and people like you who want to blame the person with agency when it is convenient for their worldview and absolve people when it is convenient to do that too. I don't view hypocrisy to necessarily be a problem, but I do find these behaviors that just happen to be hypocritical to be a problem. If you are going to be hypocritical, at least do it right.

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

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[hackwrench]

You have a weird definition of misconduct. Mine is along the lines of if someone does something that isn't the best course of action it is misconduct. I may have some qualifiers that make it more strict, but that's a start. When you haven't met a person, any opinions you have of them are going to be inaccurate. Whether or not this is inaccurate enough to make it unusable may vary, but then you end up affecting other people based on that opinion. You can convince them to share that opinion or cause them to discount what you are saying based on the fact that they feel you are judging him unreasonably, which in fact you are.

I don't make it sound like you are advocating physical assault; your narrow view of how your actions affect the people you interact with and the ensuing ripple effect, as well as your understanding of the concept of misconduct make it sound to you like I make it sound like you are advocating physical assault. Although depending on the person or people an advocation of physical assault is against, it kind of is like physical assault. But then it is also like stealing a cookie from a cookie jar. Stealing a cookie from a cookie jar isn't misconduct in your world? As the saying goes, whoever has kept the whole law but one, has broken the whole law.

Re: Why are we still talking about this guy?

[Bing Tsher E]

We will still be talking about Rosa Parks long, long after Swartz is a buried footnote. Bringing her into it is just offensive. Don't do that around actual civil rights activists because they try to be non-violent and you'll provoke them.

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[jmcvetta]

We'd be in a place with fewer petty-tyrannical laws, perhaps?

Re: Why are we still talking about this guy?

[jmcvetta]

Just like Robin Hood, right?

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[hackwrench]

Below is the post I almost made that conceded the likely possibility of your post.It still makes some valid points But back up a bit! We're talking about a petty-tyrannical law that was allowed to be made because even though what he did wasn't so wrong, the reason the law got passed was because everybody didn't do the thing that he did or were even that technically literate in many cases. When bad behavior that is prevalent isn't pointed out, nobody develops any expectations when petty-tyrannical laws come around that punish marginal behavior. So, no, more petty-tyrannical laws get passed not fewer. When you don't police yourselves, that's what happens.

The original post:
And more petty-tyrannical leaders. One of the main selling points of rule by law was that it avoided the whole petty-tyrannical leader thing which overall was worse than having petty-tyrannical laws. When you have petty-tyrannical laws and learn them or even merely of them, you are much less likely to run afoul of people who enforce them for petty-tyrannical reasons like the ones that contributed to the death of Aaron Swartz, even if you decide your freedom/rights/treatment of others is best served by breaking them. Meanwhile, tyrannical people just break down your door, and while that's been on the increase of late- SWATting anyone?- can also be averted by your own ability to take advantage of the laws that those who are prone to pettiness don't bother to learn, as well as principles underpinning current society regarding rights.

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[hackwrench]

I doubt you are actually conceding that your venting is actually a bad thing, but perhaps you think it's a neutral thing? I'm curious, because when it comes to people not doing things they think are good in one form or another, at least for them, I'm a bit ignorant. I'm not putting words in your mouth, just that you not thinking your ranting is good runs counter to my understanding of every human being ever.

...because I don't want emails on the subject, since it would be a pointless waste of my time.

Yes, that would be the potential negative outcome.

If somebody did come to them and actually beg them to shut public access down, they would laugh it off. What makes Aaron Swartz's actions the same, yet different? What I'm saying is that I don't see what makes shutting down public access a reasonable response to the actions of an individual, not even something on the level of a stand-alone complex, that would make Aaron Swartz's actions constitute begging to shut it down.

It is late, but your notions of the world are a bit of a novelty to me, so even though I have to go to bed, I'd like more dialogue in the future. I am saying this now so that you will be aware that even if my responses are not immediately forthcoming, I am still interested in what you have to say.

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[I'm New Around Here]

I'm not sure what you entire point is, because you write in a very peculiar fashion. However, I reject outright that forming opinions of people from verifiable third-person accounts is not misconduct. It is indeed how society functions.

Re: Why are we still talking about this guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

He faced 85years for a "parking ticket" offense of downloading too many library books.
If you don't get the problem I truly weep for this country

Re:Why are we still talking about this guy?

[jmcvetta]

Rule of Lawyers is overrated. Petty-tyranny is no less tyrannical when it comes plastered over with a thick layer of paperwork and judicial theatre.

Re: Why are we still talking about this guy?

[Coren22]

I wonder if the genetic modifications to make a unicorn could be done with current technology. Perhaps mixing narwhal and horse?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

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:Is it irony...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's recursion.

I suppose

[93 Escort Wagon]

If you've been wanting to read Aaron Swartz's writing but were philosophically opposed to the company's DRM, this is good news for you I guess.

I always like hearing that another one of these silly DRM schemes has been cracked... but, practically speaking, it's unlikely that "Verso Books" has any content I care about.

Arguing semantics

[Anonymous Coward]

Watermarking is not DRM, and if you invent a term "Social DRM" to describe it and its consequences purely for the sake of controversy then it's still not DRM, because DRM and "Social DRM" are still two completely different things.

That said, DRM can be used as a mechanism for watermarking, and watermarking is itself anti-consumer (because the mere existence of a watermark corresponding to you is a liability, even if you never infringe on copyright)

Re:Arguing semantics

[HiThere]

Not necessarily. A watermark can be used to validate the integrity of a copy of a document. In this use the watermark is, for example, a document checksum embedded in the document, and validates that either the document has been altered, or that it hasn't.

This use is like the encoded signing of an email, except that the presence of the signature is concealed from casual reading, but available for checking either by specialized applications or by a hex reader. It generally requires a graphics image be present, but the image can be transparent.

Re:Arguing semantics

[hackwrench]

It may not be DRM as the term is commonly used, but if you take the meanings of the words rights management, it is still a way of managing whether or not mainly people who access the material are the people who have a right to.

Re:Watermarking is not DRM

[ArchieBunker]

This watermarking is different in that it is unique to every copy of the ebook. Maybe the text was locked inside a binary?

Re: Watermarking is not DRM

[mbeckman]

"This watermarking is different in that it is unique to each copy..."

It's not different. That's the definition of watermarking. If the watermark text was not unique, is would just be called "text".

Easy to break

[dhasenan]

It's easy to break this kind of watermarking. You get K copies of the book, compare them, and take the most common version for each element. Choose K based on your budget and the degree of confidence you want that you've scrubbed everything.

For bonus points, you can analyze the types of differences and create novel watermark elements to confuse the watermark reader even more.

You have to analyze several types of media -- like CSS, HTML, and images -- but it's still pretty straightforward.

So this isn't that interesting.

If only they _had_ used DRM (but they didn't)

[Sloppy]

Watermarking isn't anything like DRM. It doesn't limit access to the work; assuming it's an otherwise standard format, you can still play/read it with anything that you want.

The fun thing would have been if they had use DRM. I suppose Swartz's estate (who?) is the copyright holder. DMCA defines circumvention as being a function of whether or not the copyright holder (not some other party) authorizes you to access the content. Presumably, Swartz' estate would authorize buyers to read the book. Therefore, you'd be legally allowed to crack whatever DRM were present, make/market/sell tools for doing that, etc. All legal because none of it would be primarily intended to circumvent.

Re:Watermarking is not DRM

[JesseMcDonald]

I applaud the usage of watermarks to enable catching copyright infringers without harmingmlegitimate uses of the material.

Watermarking favors piracy. If you get a copy of a watermarked file from a pirate site you have very little to worry about, since it's not your ID in the watermark. Someone would have to inspect the file on your PC to determine that it wasn't authorized. On the other hand, if you buy a copy of the file from the publisher using your own ID and your computer later gets infected, or a guest makes a copy, or installs a file-sharing program, or the file otherwise ends up on the Internet without your knowledge, you're going to take the blame for every download since all those copies have your ID embedded in them. As with the other, more intrusive, forms of DRM, the pirates offer a better product, this time in the form of anonymity.