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Originally Posted by NatCh
I'm not sure that this is so, bingle. I don't think there's a law against just breaking decryption, any more than there is a law against detecting police radar.
If I'm mistaken, however, please enlighten me.  |
Heheh, now you're in for it ;-P
In 1998, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) was signed into law. Its most controversial provision was one making it illegal not only to violate copyright, but also to circumvent protections enforcing the copyrights. This made a lot of people quite unhappy - all a company has to do is put trivial protections around content and it's illegal to access *even if the access is legal*. This meant, for instance, that making an open-source DVD player for Linux was technically illegal. It also had a number of other consequences - magazine 2600 was sued for posting a link to the source code for cracking the protection on DVD movies. (So, you could be liable under the DMCA for pointing us to a program that can crack PDFs - I won't tell!)
Since then, a number of other consequences have been seen - Ed Felten, a university professor, was sued for demonstrating weaknesses in a music protection scheme, BNetD was sued for making game servers that interact with Blizzard's, and, most relevant to ebooks, Dmitri Skylarov, a Russian software developer, was arrested when he came to speak at a security conference in the US. His company develops readers for PDFs that allowed screen-reading for blind readers - in order to do that, they had to break the PDF encryption, and Adobe came down on them hard. (I participated in some of the Free Dmitri protests when he was arrested - Adobe eventually backed down and dropped the charges, faced with overwhelming negative publicity.)
Among companies, Lexmark sued a cartridge manufacturer for making after-market cartridges, a garage-door manufacturer used it to prevent a competitor from making interoperable devices, and Apple sued Real Networks to prevent them selling FairPlay-compatible music.
Of course, this means that even if you're allowed to read a protected ebook (you already own a print copy, you're a student quoting it for class, it's in the public domain) you're violating the law just by doing so. Or by demonstrating how to do so. Perhaps even by talking about it ;-) It's as if you could be arrested for picking a lock to get into your own house (or telling someone else how to).
So yeah, it is illegal to break the encryption on a digital work. And it's a travesty. Here's more information (exactly what you want, I bet, after my tirade):
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/unintended_consequences.php
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Originally Posted by NatCh
On further consideration, however, I think this must only process encrypted PDFs where you have the password/key to decrypt them in the first place. As I recall, breaking encryption is notoriously time consuming, and I doubt anyone would sell a program that could do it quickly for anything like 40 bucks.. Again, now that I actually think about it. 
Thanks anyway, guys. (sheepish grin) |
What you're thinking of is brute-force decryption, which given a decent key size, takes a long long time. But encryption methods aren't perfect, so there's usually another way to crack it. It's quite possible that there's such a weakness in PDF (probably guaranteed, actually). Even if it did work on something where you have the key, it removes the protection by changing the format (probably) so it's still illegal.
Also, cracking tools usually aren't that expensive - most of them, like ConvertLIT and DeCSS, are totally free. However, some slimy companies attempt to wrap things like that up in software and sell them. I have no idea whether PDF2Word even works, or if they're slimy, or what's going on, but I'd be cautious!