U.S publishers branching into malware?

[Quexos]

Which is kind of funny if one wants to blindly believe what our governments tell us to believe, that the pirates are the bad guys and corporations the good guys.
I wonder what it will take for the masses to realize that the system is there for the benefit of the elites and the powerful, the corporations and the leaders.
And customers becoming collateral damage is the least of their worries.

If they implemented such viruses and other such malwares I think it would be tantamount to a declaration of war on all the groups and communities that make the internet what it is. And they would do well to remember that nobody truly wins a war and that casualties will be aplenty.
But then again, since the establishment does not care for simple customers, casualties will probably be the least of their concerns.

Originally Posted by HansTWN

The way I would put it is that customers are becoming collateral damage in their war with pirates.

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

It can never work. A document that is on the reader can be entirely legal, such as a converted book bought in a different format. Even if a company would check (using Wifi / internet) if you bought the book you just opened with them, that doesn't mean anything; the book could still be legal.

In both USA and Canada, if I am not mistaken, there are but a few legal exceptions to the "DRM is sacred" rule. DRM removal is illegal, almost always. If a publisher was to, say, watermark, in addition to DRM, a book, you end up with a product where discovery of DRM removal is automated (the book has watermark, it is not DRM-ed).

I am playing a devil's advocate when I say that I can see why they would attempt to attack the piracy both at the destination (end user of pirated content) and on the source (persecution of those who remove the DRM and distribute the content).

"Dear user, the file that you attempted to open on your reader had DRM removed, and your reader has been locked until you either:
- Call our 1-800 number, or
- purchase a copy from our store."

[Quexos]

Bull's eye ! That's exactly who they are. And even when playing their advocate, you recognize them for what they really are.

Originally Posted by Ankh

I am playing a devil's advocate

That would be nothing short of blackmail and I would hope that DRM removal tools makers would upgrade their tools to disable such blocking DRM software and the game of cat and mouse would go on.

Originally Posted by Ankh

"Dear user, the file that you attempted to open on your reader had DRM removed, and your reader has been locked until you either:
- Call our 1-800 number, or
- purchase a copy from our store."

Originally Posted by Quexos

If they implemented such viruses and other such malwares I think it would be tantamount to a declaration of war on all the groups and communities that make the internet what it is.

Actually, I would argue that it is an attack on the rule of law. The problem is the victim wants to collect the evidence and pass judgement. That's an awful idea since it is a conflict of interest (e.g. the victim is conducting the investigation) and because there is no independent assessment of the evidence. (There is a reason why we keep the police and courts separate.) Such a policy would be legalized vigilantism.

As for the, "mak(ing) the internet what it is," bit: I don't think that we should be proud of the scummier bits of it. Indeed, I think that we should be doing something to reduce the illegal activities online. But whatever we do, it should be just. Clearly this is not just, so it should be buried.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Ankh

In both USA and Canada, if I am not mistaken, there are but a few legal exceptions to the "DRM is sacred" rule. DRM removal is illegal, almost always. If a publisher was to, say, watermark, in addition to DRM, a book, you end up with a product where discovery of DRM removal is automated (the book has watermark, it is not DRM-ed).

I am playing a devil's advocate when I say that I can see why they would attempt to attack the piracy both at the destination (end user of pirated content) and on the source (persecution of those who remove the DRM and distribute the content).

"Dear user, the file that you attempted to open on your reader had DRM removed, and your reader has been locked until you either:
- Call our 1-800 number, or
- purchase a copy from our store."

It's possible, but there will always be readers that *don't* do that, at least outside of Canada. All readers enforcing a policy such as the one you state will not be popular for very long. I can't believe that Canada would actually forbid to import foreign readers.

[teh603]

Originally Posted by Quexos

Which is kind of funny if one wants to blindly believe what our governments tell us to believe, that the pirates are the bad guys and corporations the good guys.

I don't see how that follows from the article. IIRC there isn't any mention of the government in it anywhere.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Ankh

In both USA and Canada, if I am not mistaken, there are but a few legal exceptions to the "DRM is sacred" rule. DRM removal is illegal, almost always. If a publisher was to, say, watermark, in addition to DRM, a book, you end up with a product where discovery of DRM removal is automated (the book has watermark, it is not DRM-ed).

I am playing a devil's advocate when I say that I can see why they would attempt to attack the piracy both at the destination (end user of pirated content) and on the source (persecution of those who remove the DRM and distribute the content).

"Dear user, the file that you attempted to open on your reader had DRM removed, and your reader has been locked until you either:
- Call our 1-800 number, or
- purchase a copy from our store."

Then I open it with 7-zip find the watermark and remove it. There aren't many slack bytes in an e-book...

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Then I open it with 7-zip find the watermark and remove it. There aren't many slack bytes in an e-book...

It doesn't take many bits to encode a customer. As it stands today, 33 bits is enough to represent every person on this planet. Bump it up to 64 bits and you could represent not just the purchaser, but the purchase itself, for quite some time to come. Now 8 bytes wouldn't be hard to hide in an ebook, several times over and encoded in obscure ways that would be difficult to detect. An extra space which is never even rendered by the ereader. Tricks involving UTF which are undetectable when the document is rendered. A quirk in the markup or stylesheet which, again, isn't visibly detectable. Yet the most profitable place to hide such data would be in the images (most ebooks have at least a cover, many have graphical embellishments, some use images fundamental to the text). Done properly, the watermark can be implemented in such a way that it is impossible to remove without visibly altering the book itself. That's particularly true when it is embedded in the images.

So yeah, have fun.

[DiapDealer]

You've just described almost every digital watermarking technique already employed in a Harry Potter ebook alone.

[forcheville]

Originally Posted by BWinmill

Done properly, the watermark can be implemented in such a way that it is impossible to remove without visibly altering the book itself. That's particularly true when it is embedded in the images.

So yeah, have fun.

Yes, watermarking is the way to go. Since there are very many possible watermarking schemes that can be used in an ebook, many should be used simultaneously.

This will not affect readability or in any way harm the systems of indirectly involved parties, but will make piracy much more risky by tearing away some of the anonymity that pirates hide behind.

[speakingtohe]

IMO the article was written with the intention of exploiting existing paranoia among the ebook reading community, expecially those who acquire their books legally.

Serious pirates will look at this and laugh.

Worst case, if they destroyed your computer to a smoking ruin, in which case, you would possibly see the warning message, you could buy a new computer, and lie low till the dust settled. If you absolutely had to pirate, you could do it at the library or buy a really cheap computer/tablet for this purpose. If they got you twice, then their would be a lot of computers going down and possibly more than a few law suits launched by smoking computer owners.


If they lock down the computer, would a serious pirate meekly call the publisher and buy the book? Would they turn themselves into a law enforcement agency? Perhaps instead they would simply reformat their hard drive, or restore from a known good backup. An inconvenience to be sure, but not the end of the world.

And as others have already said, it would raise a great cloud of righteous indignation, hacker groups would become involved and the content owners/distributers would possibly be subjected to attacks on their systems.

To me, and I am not a lawyer, it seems that every person who recieved a warning, should be prosecuted if any are. I know that this is not how it works at present, but if you threaten say 100,000 people with prosecution , then you should be prepared to carry through with these threats or be percieved as ineffectual.

Can the publishers afford the legal costs of prosecuting more than a small percentage. Can they regain the cost of the lawyers and researchers, tech people etc. by suing a person or 100,000 for the cost of an ebook plus damages? And if they just go after the massive downloaders, can they expect many of them to be able to afford to pay if they do win.

It is pretty well a situaltion of trying to punish the pirates, not recouping lost profits, and if the publishers are stupid enough to think this will benifit them long run, well it will likelybe less successful than other attempts by other media providers in the past.

Not advocating piracy, but I do not see this sort of fear mongering doing anything to reduce it.

Helen

[Katsunami]

Pffff. Downloading an ebook cannot be forbidden. Some politician in the Netherlands tried to pass a law that downloading material for which the consumer has no right should become illegal. His vision: "The person must first research if a file is legal for him to download. If he downloads material he has no right to, he could be sued."

Put this into google:

<book title> <author> <epub>

Maybe... just maybe, I'm trying to find a place where I can buy this book? Yes, I often use Google for such things. I often find stores (for computer stuff) that are not on the big price comparison websites. Often Google can search inside sites better than the sites themselves, and so it often returns results that one normally would not obtain.

However, Google's search capability is so vast, that it sometimes *directly* links to illegal stuff on some download site. I've had this happen with books (trying to find an out of print book), with complete music albums (out of "print" CD's), and software (old games).

To prevent an accidental "illegal" download, I would need to research each and every link before clicking it, and that is just completely impossible. Everybody who is on the internet would become a potential criminal with each click, except when doing extensive research first, making the internet unusable.

It was quickly pointed out to him that such a law would be very impractical, and impossible to enforce.

[JoeD]

Originally Posted by Fat Abe

The only industry successful at battling the pirates is the game console business.

Piracy is rife on game consoles too, although they usually have an initial grace period until exploits are found and refined. Consoles do have a slight edge for online based games though as any detected exploit would result in your account being banned, as has happened in several purges over the years.

As far as the vector through which an infection would enter your machine, most likely the "enemy" would try to exploit a stack overflow in Calibre, either in a plugin or its reader/viewer.

Any publisher that finds such a weakness and exploits it rather than reports it would probably be in hot water. Aside from various hacking laws being broken, they'd be showing a workable exploit to anyone in the hacking community who could then use it to infect calibre users with all sorts of nasty malware from books uploaded to more innocuous sites.

I just can't see it being feasible to do without opening yourself up to numerous lawsuits and criminal charges. Game consoles get away with banning because everyone agrees to their ToS and they don't brick/lock your console, they just ban you from accessing the service.

Closest analogy to that would be Amazon detecting a pirated book on your kindle and banning your amazon account, but book devices need to allow DRM'd and non DRM'd book and books bought from various stores. It wouldn't be simple for Amazon to do the same kind of testing without risking getting it wrong.

Which, even if Amazon and other retailers did that, would miss the point that it wouldn't impact the pirates who downloaded from torrent/whatever as they have no account to ban.

[John F]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

...

All it takes is one case where a downloader can legitimately claim a fair use reason to download--or being in a country where it's legal (like visiting Canada and downloading texts that are in the public domain there but not in the US)--and they've got grounds for a whopping lawsuit against the publisher. ...

Originally Posted by teh603

Fair use is only valid if you've got the money to stand up for it in court and through multiple tiers of appeals, which 99% of Americans don't have. The other 1%... well, they have enough money to buy out Congress if they really wanted to.

Then problem solved: the 1% will buy out congress (pass a law that prohibits the behavior) or sue. Thank you 1%.

[CyGuy]

The solution is to outlaw ANY form of encryption on any media being sold to the public. No DRM of any kind allowed on public sales of content. As for this proposed malware/spyware/virus installation, put a few of the offenders in prison and that will stop quickly enough...