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?

[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?

[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?

[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

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 ...

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.

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".