Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
And if you did post the watermarked CSS, or perhaps used the ScrambleEbook calibre plugin and uploaded the results? The only people who will know who you are, are the publishers/vendors who have the restricted user database which matches watermarks to users. And not only do I very much doubt they care enough to find that book, I cannot feel too fussed about the privacy reveal involved.
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It isn't always necessary to have access to the publisher's database to find the identity associated with the watermark, it could be that someone posts a part of the book containing the hidden watermark under their real name in one forum (say as Professor of Literature in a student forum) and another post anonomously in another forum (say as a member of the 50 Shades of Grey fanclub.) Then the identity could be revealed just by the fact that the watermarks match.
Also there are legitimate activities that have nothing to do with privacy that could be hampered by the presence of a watermark. For example a legitimate owner of an ebook might want to share corrections for publisher's mistakes with other legitimate owners of the same edition of the ebook, which could be done by sending a contextual diff taken between the original and corrected book. The diff file would contain snippets of the original book, perhaps including markup and stylesheet. But if all the books had a different watermark then the diff might not match, which would be an inconvenience to the legitimate owners of the ebook.
On the other hand if a group of people who had pirated the ebook from the same site might all have the same watermark, and they could then share their corrections via contextual diff without being inconvenienced in the way that the legitimate owners were.
I think this is a good enough reason for legitimate owners to want to remove all watermarks from their ebooks, or to avoid buying ebooks that have watermarks when other alternatives are available.