Quote:
Originally Posted by PandathePanda
I doubt there will be a drm that will be able to be used to trace where a share come from.
I tested software a few years back who claimed to be able to this, and was able to "crack it" (that was me job) and produce untraceable copies.
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They do that now with watermarking. I'm not sure how resilient watermarking is in ebooks but a few years ago I participated in a test with Audible when they began using it. I was in a special forum they had to help them gauge customer reaction to their ideas and one of their developers told us about watermarking and I said there's no way that it can withstand conversion. So the company got a few of us with some tech skills to help them test it.
We all had each other's email addresses. Audible sent each of us a book, keyed to our accounts and we each did whatever we thought might fool them. Then we swapped books with one another, did further conversions on each other's books, and sent them back to audible. This is a few years ago and I don't really remember a lot of details but I think I have that about right.
Anyway they told us who was behind each book we sent back and they were right 100% of the time. So we did it again with another book and tried harder and they got it right again. I don't remember how many tries we made but it was probably 4 or 5. We never fooled them. Not even once.
I even went so far as playing the book on an MP3 player and piping the output into a computer's mike jack and recording it. Then I converted my recording into a different format. I may have then converted into anotoher format. I don't recall. They spotted it. They knew it was the book sent to me.
The long and the short of it is that watermarking works and is extremely effective at least with sound files. They don't do it by embedding metadata. They do it by embedding sound, carefully selected so it won't be noticed by the listener but will be picked up by any conversion process. How they do that I don't have the slightest idea but it works whatever they do.
With ebooks, since it can easily be converted to pure text in some format, such as HTML or RTF, it's probably going to be easier to defeat it, unless they know some tricks I don't, which is very possible. However, not knowing what they're doing it's going to take some serious study to be sure it's been defeated.
I buy my books. If a book I want isn't available through legitimate sources I'll get a pirate copy. I share my books with friends but only if I'm pretty sure they won't make them public in some way. I don't consider myself a purist about this but I do consider myself basically an honest guy. I don't really care what other people do but I like to be reasonably careful.
Anyway, back to the point. It's entirely possible to make a book identifiable and I suspect that can carry though conversion, although I'd be surprised if there weren't ways around that. When you're talking about DRM and defeating DRM any absolute answer to any question is likely to be wrong. Maybe, maybe not, is usually a more accurate way of looking at this stuff.
Barry