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There is a similar solution in existence today.
Photoshop - that was discussed to death in thi thread offers one interesting service.
Watermarking.
It works like this:
You create a picture or "photoshop" a photo. You include a watermark in your picture. The watermark is undetectable by a naked eye, because it gets lost in a noise generated by jpg compression algorithm.
The service consists of a server that crawls the internet, and examines all pictures if they have a watermark. Then it reports to you the sites that contain pictures with your watermark. The watermark is supposed to be able to survive the change of the resolution, some editing or cropping.
I can imagine a following service:
You generate a pdf file in such a way as to make extraction of the text highly difficult (more difficult than scanning and OCR-ing a paper equivalent) and include the watermrk And/or name of the purchaser in the file.
You would not make one fixed size pdf file, but you would make a web interface where the customer could choose from a few preformated options like A4 + small font, A4 + large font, A5 + small font, A5 + large font, 6" e-ink screen, 8" e-ink screen, or the customer could choose a size (within reasonable limits), font family (Serif or sans-serif), and size of the font and have the pdf generated "on demand".
Then you would make a server farm that would - just like search engines - "crawl" the internet and look at the pdf files if they contain the watermark. Then you report the occurence of the watermarked file to the author that has purchased that particular watermark to mark his files. You would have a whitelist of servers (like authors website) that would be ignored for that particular watermark. A similar crawler could be made for irc channels (where content that violates the copyrights is sometimes spread via DCC protocol) or for torrents or for p2p networks.
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