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Originally Posted by tho
nobody could give me an idea so far how to give a DRM eBook to somebody legally. From my point of view this is not an technical issue but an organising one.
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The IEEE has a plan for setting this up, and they're working on the technical side of it. (It involves a
registered "playkey" that can get handed off. Once you hand over the playkey, you can't get it back.)
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The basic idea of P1817 is as old as the first generation of DRM implementations: to approximate important characteristics of physical media products in the digital world, so that physical-world business models can migrate online. But P1817 follows a different approach to this goal than DRM systems have done so far. Briefly, it binds a “playkey” tightly to an encrypted content file, so that you have to possess the playkey in order to play the content (or more accurately, to decrypt a content key which unlocks the content). So far, so typical; but here’s the difference: a key identification and management scheme sits in the background and ensures that only one user can possess a given playkey at a time.
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However, as mentioned, the big publishers aren't interested. Most of them don't allow ebooks to be loaned once for two weeks; they're certainly not going to agree to ebooks being exchanged or *gasp* resold, with profit going to someone other than the publishing house, just like used paperbacks.
Transferring legal ownership of digital files is a technical problem that the DRM-pushing world has no interest in solving. The main purpose of DRM is not to prevent piracy; it's to prevent casual sharing and loans-to-friends. The publishers are under the impression that they'll sell more books if people can't hand them to a co-worker when they're done reading. They believe that if you liked the book & talk about it at work, your co-worker will go out & buy their own copy if they can't borrow yours.