Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Bob Russell
Why would we gain by tying an e-book to a physical storage card?
|
Well, I apparently haven't been terribly successfull at explaining this before, but I'll give it another shot.
Keep in mind that I'm answering mostly from my own perspective, so salt to taste.
Part of it is that it would keep a book a "thing," allowing selling lending and such. To me, I like the idea of having that physical token to match to the book, the file on disk ... lacks something, somehow. Purely a psycological issue, I know.
Another part is to try and take the DRM out of the file itself, and tie it to a physical thing of some sort, like the old security dongles.
If you
could set up a card that allowed reading a file, but not wholesale copying, then you'd get the security of DRM, without a lot of its more burdensome limitations.
The idea I mentioned about ecrypting the file to the card's (notional) serial number would give you a file that could only be decrypted from the card it was legitimately placed on to begin with. It would require that the file be encapsulated as well, I suppose, in some sort of controller app that would go find that card SN, decrypt the file, and then serve the text up in chunks.
The file itself could be copied off wholesale, but it could only be read by activating the decrypter app, which would only work if it found the correct card SN in the expected place. (A lot of this is based on conjecture, as I don't even know if such a SN exists, per se).
Could someone write a program to simply query the encapsulating app for "servings" of text, and then recombine them into a complete, unencrypted file? Sure they could, but if the situation is such that you can already do what you want to with the file in terms of reading, lending, selling (burning
), in the first place, the pressure to do that would be pretty small, and the interest in using it would fall to that fringe of society that isn't going to pay for their books in the first place.
I suppose at its root, the idea of a solid state e-book is just another avenue of exploration in search of a Holy Grail of DRM, one that discourages casual piracy down to the level of diminishing returns, but stays out of the way of honest users (the vast majority, after all), as much as a paper book does, while still protecting the intellectual propery's owners' rights to a reasonable degree. I'm not suggesting that it's the only way that will work, nor even that it will work, just that it ought to be looked at.
And of course, there's the factor that lots of SciFi refers to future readers popping a "book tape" into their reading devices. Shouldn't we respect the oracles of our future?
