TM: An alternative to DRM? Let's discuss.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

I suggest we all look at what China is doing about these issues.

I suggest we *not* try to model ourselves on one of the most repressive regimes currently in existence, notorious for ignoring basic human rights (including freedom of expression, which is what they most infamously use their internet traffic monitering to stifle).

[Taylor514ce]

I think IP rights ought to be controlled at the most basic level: in the minds of the consumer. After all, if I pay an employee to develop a skill, or to work with some of my data, then they are violating my IP rights if they take that skill or knowledge to another employer. What we need is a way to apply DRM down to the core cellular level, perhaps with some kick-ass Sumerian word virus. That would make an awesome book.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Taylor514ce

I think IP rights ought to be controlled at the most basic level: in the minds of the consumer. After all, if I pay an employee to develop a skill, or to work with some of my data, then they are violating my IP rights if they take that skill or knowledge to another employer. What we need is a way to apply DRM down to the core cellular level, perhaps with some kick-ass Sumerian word virus. That would make an awesome book.

finally someone with some sense.

[Lucien21]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

I suggest we all look at what China is doing about these issues.

Like Zelda says "lets not".

For one China is a repressive regime bent on censoring the internet and any other infomation that doesn't agree with their ideals.

and secondly, China is the world leader in Piracy. It has a 90% illegal software rate.

[BooksForABuck]

Citing China's piracy rate as a reason to avoid DRM and other means of preventing piracy is a bit of a cheat since the Chinese government has encouraged piracy.

I agree, though, that there are some pretty severe privacy issues in allowing ISPs to monitor all of my traffic and identify any books that I'm sending and receiving. As an author and publisher, I'm interested in receiving payment for my books, but as a reader, I'd just as soon not have some stranger checking out my reading material before I go in for a job interview or when I put in a bid on a government contract.

Rob Preece
Publisher, www.BooksForABuck.com

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

As you will all carefully note, I never said it was an attractive prospect. (Heck, I didn't even say it would work.) But it is, in fact, the 800-pound gorilla in the room, and what we could have in store if we can't find better ways of dealing with our IP issues.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Taylor514ce

I think IP rights ought to be controlled at the most basic level: in the minds of the consumer. After all, if I pay an employee to develop a skill, or to work with some of my data, then they are violating my IP rights if they take that skill or knowledge to another employer. What we need is a way to apply DRM down to the core cellular level, perhaps with some kick-ass Sumerian word virus. That would make an awesome book.

Ni! Ni! Ni!

(I had to use 3 of them, because the software wouldn't let me use it just once.)

[NatCh]

Considering the Chinese government also believes it can control the weather, I've moved them much higher on my "not a good reference point" list.

[spooky69]

Originally Posted by NatCh

Considering the Chinese government also believes it can control the weather, I've moved them much higher on my "not a good reference point" list.

Aren't they using actual science here (at least to some extent)? Cloud seeding is pretty well-known, and as far as I know it's pretty distinguishable from the concept of the mad scientist sitting in his cliff-top castle throwing switches to influence the Gods' will.

[kacir]

There is a similar solution in existence today.

Photoshop - that was discussed to death in thi thread offers one interesting service.
Watermarking.
It works like this:
You create a picture or "photoshop" a photo. You include a watermark in your picture. The watermark is undetectable by a naked eye, because it gets lost in a noise generated by jpg compression algorithm.

The service consists of a server that crawls the internet, and examines all pictures if they have a watermark. Then it reports to you the sites that contain pictures with your watermark. The watermark is supposed to be able to survive the change of the resolution, some editing or cropping.

I can imagine a following service:
You generate a pdf file in such a way as to make extraction of the text highly difficult (more difficult than scanning and OCR-ing a paper equivalent) and include the watermrk And/or name of the purchaser in the file.
You would not make one fixed size pdf file, but you would make a web interface where the customer could choose from a few preformated options like A4 + small font, A4 + large font, A5 + small font, A5 + large font, 6" e-ink screen, 8" e-ink screen, or the customer could choose a size (within reasonable limits), font family (Serif or sans-serif), and size of the font and have the pdf generated "on demand".

Then you would make a server farm that would - just like search engines - "crawl" the internet and look at the pdf files if they contain the watermark. Then you report the occurence of the watermarked file to the author that has purchased that particular watermark to mark his files. You would have a whitelist of servers (like authors website) that would be ignored for that particular watermark. A similar crawler could be made for irc channels (where content that violates the copyrights is sometimes spread via DCC protocol) or for torrents or for p2p networks.

[Olympus]

Another suggestion in a similar direction.

Each buyer get's a personalised JPG containing the cover art an his/her purchase e-mail
In the JPG is the text of the book "watermarked".

The reading software uses the JPG as cover, when users starts reading the reading software extracts on the fly the text and keeps this in memory. Probably using a public/private key encription supplied by the PUBLISHER.

Should a simple user tamper with the JPG picture then his books becomes unusable. When he shares his "unaltered" copy then his "credentials" are shown on the JPG- cover.
Advanced piracy is not prevented but I accept that as a fact of life. Normal consumers just get all the advantages of a normal book without DRM, and can even share their books like in real life, but the reader is always reminded of the original purchaser by looking at the cover art that display's their registration credentials.

Publishers should register a public/private key registration with the ISBN institute. And Mobipocket (current defacto standard) and the few readers available should be updated to perform this "trick".
(I should "patent" this idea??)

[pieter]

You'd have to download all the content first to check it, right? If the watermark is inside the file, I mean. So the crawler would download all torrent files it could find and every file offered on irc, and then check for the watermark.
That's an awfull lot of bandwith you're gonna use. And your computer will be the single biggest "pirate" as far as the law is concerned, if it downloads everything.

I really don't see how this could be properly automated. Why not just search for the pirated content with a team of people. Like the RIAA/music industry is doing. And then sue whatever ip you can find that offers copyrighted material.
I'm not sure we could say that the music industry is winning this fight at the moment.
Besides, when you've scooped up a million people that were sharing copyrighted pdf's, what do you do then? Sue them all? The next day, if you dont stop your crawler you will have another list of a million people.

Which brings me to a question I have for Steve Jordan. Since he really wants us to explore the way China handles the internet. What do you think would be a suitable punishment for somebody who has a digital copy of one of your books, which he didn't pay for.
And what would be a suitable punishment for somebody who sends that unpaid for file to three of his friends?

[ath]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Actually, I was thinking it would not require a warrant: It could potentially become a fairly automated process that would spit out data type (copywritten text), sender and recipient to local law enforcement, leaving it up to the law to contact either and have them establish lawfulness, or face fines/punishment.

Do I get that right -- the suspects are expected to prove their innocence?

What legal system is this supposed to work under?

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by ath

Do I get that right -- the suspects are expected to prove their innocence?

What legal system is this supposed to work under?

This is like the speeding camera system: Supposedly, if you were detected by the system as transmitting or receiving illicit goods, that detection is the accusation of guilt, like the picture of you and your car speeding through the detection zone. You can either accept it, and the punishment, or demonstrate that you did nothing wrong (by producing the legally purchased file). You are still innocent until proven guilty... but if you cannot produce counter-evidence to refute their evidence, you will be found guilty.

This is basically the method by which the RIAA has been pursuing file-sharers, so there is already a precedent in-place.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by pieter

Which brings me to a question I have for Steve Jordan. Since he really wants us to explore the way China handles the internet. What do you think would be a suitable punishment for somebody who has a digital copy of one of your books, which he didn't pay for.
And what would be a suitable punishment for somebody who sends that unpaid for file to three of his friends?

Despite the fact that I'm not a court, a lawyer, or China, my answer is: A fine on each instance of possession of the illicit copy, including each instance of the illicit copy sent to their friends... in your example, it would be 4 instances, so the penalty would be 4 times the established fine. (Per the reasons described above, I will refrain from specifying a dollar amount.)

Most likely, a court system would need a backup plan for instances when they could not establish how many copies were actually transacted (re; the RIAA vs. Jammie Thomas case), would attempt to establish some number of "projected" transactions, and base their fine accordingly. This would be the best way to limit the number of illicit files turning up on P2P sites, because it would put the infringer at risk to having to pay a fine equal to a large number of potential P2P users... even a small single-instance fine could end up being quite large in that case (ask Jammie).

By the way: What, exactly, did China have to do with that question? China would just throw you in jail if they even suspected you'd done anything.