New DRM method changes the author's words to make each copy unique and traceable

[Serpentine]

This has already been used for a while afaik. There are also versions which use whitespace and hyphenation markers. There's also the whole image stenography bit, not the usual appended metadata, but simple binary via pixel values in png/gif (chapter markers, wooo).

I don't really see fingerprinting as being DRM, since it doesn't try to "manage rights" (or mangle them, if done nicely)... and it's pretty much impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt.

[BeccaPrice]

FRankly, the book keeping aspects of this seem appalling, particularly when we're talking best sellers - who keeps the data base of which purchaser has which minor nit changed?

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by BeccaPrice

FRankly, the book keeping aspects of this seem appalling, particularly when we're talking best sellers - who keeps the data base of which purchaser has which minor nit changed?

It only requires associating a single number with all the changes.

Suppose 30 paragraphs have or do not have a blank space character following the last period. Each paragraph is assigned a number n between 0 and 29. If the nth paragraph does not have a trailing blank, its value is 0, if it does, the value is 2 to the nth power. The single serial number for the book is the sum of all the paragraph values.

This is trivial for big e-tailers. BPH might have trouble getting retailers to report the number, but that is a problem other than accounting.

[MV64]

Not only is this offensive to authors, but it only hurts the original pirate, right? If I'm sharing a file shared by someone else first, how is this going to stop me?

[bla]

This so much reminds me of the old pc days and the attempts of the vendors to copy protect diskettes.. it didn't work because somebody always found a way around it and all it did was annoy regular customers... you would think they would learn from history.... but apparently not.. the fact is there is no way to effectively stop anyone scanning a book and producing their own e book... all you need is a $200 scanner some OCR software and a lot of patience... all drm does is piss off legitimate customers who have to jump through hoops every time they want to use a different device.. it's like buying a car and the maker fixing it so it will only run on I95 it's madness... all they are doing is driving people to piracy .... dumb dumb dumb

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by bla

This so much reminds me of the old pc days and the attempts of the vendors to copy protect diskettes.

I think it's virtually impossible to find reliable statistics on this, so one can believe what they want.

My impression is that software copy protection is much more effective today than in the floppy era. As a result, the great majority of Windows, and Microsoft Office, users are contributing to Microsoft's annual software sales of maybe US$60 billion.

I don't play in, or follow the world of, computer games, but according to this a lot of that software is also more effectively protected than in the diskette era:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/691088-xbox-one/66278379

Thievery will always exist. No preventive measures will ever come close to being completely effective. But it's not always true that thieves win.

Improving the effectiveness of copy protection for books is a tremendous challenge for reasons given in the thread. It's a hard problem, but one can't rule out technical advances.

One reason that software copy protection is today more effective than eBook copy protection is that software copy protection has been improving for the last 35 years.