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09-07-2013, 05:43 PM | #1 | |
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Anti-piracy watermark in e-books gets disassembled, it's a tiny barcode!
Last month we learned how the anti-piracy outfit BREIN is able to track down suspected e-book pirates by matching digital watermarks inside e-books with the transaction records they receive from e-book sellers (not without causing a political controversy). If you've caught yourself wondering how such a digital watermark looks like, a computer science student at the University of Twente was able to get his hands on a watermarked EPUB file and dissected it into pieces. The result is astonishingly simple: embedded on every page in the book is a minuscule image that turns out to be an ordinary barcode. This barcode contains the transaction code which uniquely identifies the e-book purchase.
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09-07-2013, 07:23 PM | #2 |
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Interesting-but rather useless IMO. There's no need for a digital watermark to be visible at all. Not simply 'nearly impossible to notice' but totally impossible to notice except by looking at the code. And if you look at the code you'll notice whatever the watermark is, as this discovery of the BREIN watermark demonstrates. The only way I can think of to not 'notice' the watermark would be for the code to look the same even though it was doing something different. Steganography-maybe that's what BREIN was trying to do & they were just rather clumsy at it.
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09-07-2013, 07:32 PM | #3 |
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Maybe they're just trying to catch the people who don't know better.
The ones who do know better would just compare multiple documents in an attempt to pull out the common bits and remove the bits with encoded information, or use some scheme that would mangle the encoded information if they only have a single copy of the document. That would make those people harder to catch, so why bother going to the expense of trying to catch them if they can drive piracy far enough underground by discouraging the naive pirates? |
09-07-2013, 07:32 PM | #4 | |
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09-07-2013, 07:54 PM | #5 |
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Possibly for prosecution. Although laws are probably different in European courts in the US you can't 'entice' somebody into committing a crime. If you want to prosecute then you need to take 'normal' defensive measures. Not all courts draw the line in the same place but there have been cases where a charge of trespassing has been dismissed because there were no signs on the property prohibiting it. AFAIK there have been no cases of theft dismissed for similar reasons so the rulings might not apply (even if European laws are the same) but the prudent course would be to assume they do & 'post a sign' by putting DRM on the books.
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09-07-2013, 08:15 PM | #6 |
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So basically, all the information is just there, in plain sight, obfusticated a bit.
To someone who knows computers and programming, this sort of encoding (Unix timestamps, base64 for an image, sometimes used to "embed" many small images in HTML code, to prevent server file requests) is the same as trying to "encode" a message by writing it backward and hoping no-one will notice. Using Sigil's search and replace, this watermark can be removed within seconds. Last edited by Katsunami; 09-07-2013 at 08:21 PM. |
09-07-2013, 08:15 PM | #7 |
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One, that's not a barcode. It's a serial number. One is an image while the other is text. Okay, that is really a po-tay-toe po-tah-toe difference but I am feeling nitpicky today.
Also why would anyone wonder what a digital watermark looked like? We already knew what Booxtream put into the Pottermore ebooks: http://www.the-digital-reader.com/20...by-booxstream/ Curiously enough, the Booxtream digital watermark used in Pottermore seems to be entirely different. Pottermore doesn't use that embedded serial number on every page. Maybe the above example came from a fixed layout textbook? |
09-07-2013, 08:29 PM | #8 |
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BTW, that's probably not the only digital watermark in that ebook. The source has admitted on Twitter that he didn't check the images in the ebook.
https://twitter.com/koenrh/status/376384971545788416 |
09-07-2013, 09:00 PM | #9 |
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Would this not be defeated by a simple conversion to another format?
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09-07-2013, 09:12 PM | #10 | |
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My biggest problem with watermarks is if they interfere with the story I am trying to read. Give me a non intrusive method of DRM any day. Helen |
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09-07-2013, 09:26 PM | #11 | |
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That's a term I've not encountered before. I must look into that. |
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09-07-2013, 09:30 PM | #12 |
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09-08-2013, 02:01 AM | #13 | |||
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Last edited by Alexander Turcic; 09-08-2013 at 02:20 AM. |
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09-08-2013, 02:02 AM | #14 | ||
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09-08-2013, 02:52 AM | #15 |
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