A USA Today article briefly covers the debut of several new consumer-oriented technologies that contain copy-protection technology, including tech for digital textbooks that can’t be copied and “expire” after a year. It also touches on copy-protection tech that failed in the marketplace.
These devices are being offered, but the knowledgeable won’t buy them. They’ll go the way of the Sony Atrac devices.
These people are so dense. Sure these measures will discourage (but not prevent) casual copying. The institutional fraudsters (read maffia and assorted lowlifes) in the meantime will just keep copying since they have the means to pay off the low wage drones with access to the master copies.
The irony ofcourse is that casual copying actually boosts sales (according to most studies and annecdotal evidence). Punishing your customers and strengthening the mobsters, gotta love big business.
There is no such thing as an unbreakable copy protection scheme given a sufficiently motivated individual. Period.
Remindes me, of the following talk:
http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt
If you can read it on your screen, then you can use a screen-capture utility to save the screen as a jpeg.
It’s as simple as that – no need for fancy software to defeat copy protection. When will these morons ever learn?
Only idiots will be the ones wasting their money on copy-protected crap. I would not ever spend a cent on anything with some weird copy-protection scheme that might even give you a hard time playing it or not play at all because of some obscure configuration issues.
I stick to good old filesharing, preferably the anonymous encrypted type e.g. Freenet, Entropy, Nodezilla, Winny, etc.
Agreed. Although I do buy CDs from bands that I like (even though I could just get the mp3s and get on with it), I will never buy copy-protected CDs, and even less books. This is ridiculous.
My consolation is that, as someone pointed out, as long as you can read or listen to the thing, it can be copied..so it’s just stupid.
Books that expire? Strange idea… when I look into my bookshelf I don’t see anything disappear. Why should I accept this to be the case with e-books? What do I get in exchange?
What do I get in exchange?
A lighter wallet and an unpleasant burning sensation when you sit.
… their message to customers is “Fuck you!”
Now what do you think will be the customers response?
Unfortunately it will be “Thank you Sir, may I have another?”
Well, if you like …
MY reponse is quite different …
Can we all start calling this technology what it really is? Copy-Prevention.
Or better yet…Copy-prohibited.
i would love to be able to go to a book store an buy an e-book on cd of some of my books…. unfortunatly having it expire, or having added copy protection schemes added will prevent me from ever doing this even if this media becomes widely available. the sad part? if they didnt spend so much to develop and install copy-prevention devices the finished product would be a lot cheeper. more peeple would BUY it instead of pie-rat it.
We have much better technology then say 50 years ago. It allows us to freely share our ideas, art like music, or books. Why people invest a lot of time to prevent others from doing it? Why instead of making a “better book” they create worse book, that disappears after year? Are we – society – really so stupid? Shall we allow that? I think that some people are trying to appropriate whole intelectual property of the world, making us a slaves.
At least from the publisher’s perspective. I doubt there’s a huge problem with text book piracy, photocopies simply don’t make up for the real thing. A digital copy, on the other hand, once cracked and copied will be just as useful as the original so I only see this increasing piracy.
I figure the publishers are trying to kill the used book market, forcing students to buy new books every time. This makes no sense to me as you’re targetting a market that doesn’t have a tonne of extra cash to spare on books (increasingly the likelyhood of going without or pirating) and text books already go for exhorbitant prices because they’re such a small market.
I personally would be sticking with the paper copies if this digital stuff came anywhere near my school, unless they did away with the expiration thing.
“At least from the publisher’s perspective. I doubt there’s a huge problem with text book piracy, photocopies simply don’t make up for the real thing. A digital copy, on the other hand, once cracked and copied will be just as useful as the original so I only see this increasing piracy.”
I agree. Besides, I would much rather read a real “dead tree” book than some digital textbook. At least with current technology. Maybe someday in the future digital paper will be at the point where it is as good as the real thing, but currently “dead tree” is so much better than a computer screen.
Back when I was in school there were two factors in my desision to buy a textbook: how much I felt the book would help me in my class, and how much the book would benifit me as a reference later on. So, for example, I bought my PDEs book, because I knew the professor would be assigning homework regularly out of the book so it would be needed in the class. On the other hand, I didn’t feel my Algorithms book would really be very usefull in my Analysis of Algorithms class, but the book was a really great reference book, so it would be very usefull later on. However, I never bought my Database book. I knew that there was plenty of free information on SQL and Databases on the Internet, and I didn’t care enough about databases to actually want a reference book.
The whole point is books that expire would take one of the big reasons for even buying books away from me. It would just make me want to either try to get around the copy protection if I feel I need the book for the class, or split the cost with somebody else and share the book.
As I have said before, DRM is evil.
The pirates will keep pirating, while we – honest users – pay the consequences and see our rights taken away.
Case and point:
I needed a textbook for my class that starts in two weeks. The textbook is brand spanking new – the new edition was finalized last March, but at the time I was looking on amazon.com only the previous edition was out. The quoted price on the new edition (not available for sale yet) was over $120! (a rip-off if you ask me-but we’ll discuss the textbook rip-off another time).
What to do? I wanted to get a head start and read at least some of the book before classes start. Well the publisher has an ebook version – yay! — and it’s great that you have two equally crappy options:
1. The “Online” version that allows you to view from any computer BUT you can only print materials out once and you need to be online and have a browser with appropriate plugins – so non windows, non macos machines are left out in the cold
2. An encrypted PDF that you can download only ONCE! This option gives you the ability to print out as many copies as you want – BUT you can only use it on ONE computer and with ONE user, so the file is tied to a specific user account and a specific HD serial number. If that user account gets deleted, or the HD craps out and you need to replace it – tough luck!
I have tried to “print to PDF” as I am a macuser, but this option is not available! (I dont have the full adobe acrobat suite so I dont know if it works that way – the print to PDF)
I’ve had textbooks in the past, lots of them, but I was NEVER so restricted!
There are utilities you can buy online for about $20 that ignore those ridiculous “no printing” flags in certain PDFs. For any sort of extended reading, it’s going to paper, come hell or high water, period.
Yes.. can you name a few utilities that allow printing? I for one hasn’t found a way to crack open PDF DRM.
Someone said that there is always a way to circumvent DRM, but apparently PDF is not crackable in the sense that no one has released a DRM-Remover for the latest encrypted PDF.
Textbook that expires within a year is not right. That’s the reason why I stick with hardcopy text, not digital ones.
The digital textbooks are being offered at substantially lower (about 33%) prices than the paper versions. And they expire sometime after the end of term.
There is only one point, and that is to kill the aftermarket of used textbook stores.
Publishers want to collect revenues every time a book changes hands, but recent court decisions have prevented them from doing so. They think they have a chance of doing this with self-destructing digital media.
It’s not unlike subscription-based software – you want the customers to keep paying and paying and paying for the same product in order to fatten your revenue streams.
The ability or inability to copy something is not a big issue for me mostly because it is difficult to copy books anyhow. What concerns me is the extra baggage: DRM. Instead of allowing us to use their work as we please, they are telling us how to use it. A classic example is given in the article: the book expires after one year.
I really don’t see the benefit of buying a book which will expire after one year. This is because I face a decision at the end of the semester: either I keep the book for future reference, or I sell it to another student. Clearly, this DRM scheme will prevent both. It also does a diservice to me as a consumer in another respect: while saving 33% may sound impressive to a cash strapped student, I can easy save twice that by buying a used book from a student-run co-op then by selling it back the next year.
Then how do you crack a pdf ebook protected with EXP_HANDLER? I actually legally own one of these, and the copy protection is a pain in the arse. It’d be nice to be able to copy and/or print from it.
“Yes.. can you name a few utilities that allow printing? I for one hasn’t found a way to crack open PDF DRM.”
‘PDF Password Remover’ and ‘Guaranteed PDF Decryptor (GuaPDF)’ will remove password restrictions outright from PDF files, and will allow modifying & printing.
This will not work, however, with signed digital certificates, the newer form of DRM in Acrobat. I don’t know of any program that will do this (yet).
This will not work, however, with signed digital certificates, the newer form of DRM in Acrobat. I don’t know of any program that will do this (yet).
There is an Elcomsoft util that will crack Microsoft reader ebooks – I heard it used to do Adobe’s newer DRM as well, until the guy coding it got his ass sued off by Adobe
Elcomsoft’s Dmitry Sklyarov was not sued, he was arrested by the FBI when he tried to present a paper on the encryption at the DefCon-9 conference in Las Vegas.
He was arrested and charged with a “single count of trafficking in a product designed to circumvent copyright protection measures in violation of Title 17, United States Code, Section 1201(b)(1)(A). This is one of the first prosecutions in the United States under this statute, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).”
And I don’t know if he cracked the digital certificate protection – it was for the Adobe ebook reader. Elcomsoft in fact claimed that the encryption was weak and included ROT-13 !!!
Elcomsoft still sells a program called “Advanced PDF Password Recovery”.
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i would love to be able to go to a book store an buy an e-book on cd of some of my books…. unfortunatly having it expire, or having added copy protection schemes added will prevent me from ever doing this even if this media becomes widely available. the sad part? if they didnt spend so much to develop and install copy-prevention devices the finished product would be a lot cheeper. more peeple would BUY it instead of pie-rat it.
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The e-books being described are college textbooks (though, no doubt, the technology would spread from there). Textbooks of course, are very expensive. Why is this? Simple. The used book market. Book publishers have about one year, two at the very most, to make any money off a textbook. Within one term of a textbook’s release, the sales of new copies of the textbooks drop dramatically. Many bookstores actually make *more* money off used textbooks than they do off new ones. Of course, the publisher makes *nothing* off each used book sold. To counter this, they’ve got no choice but to make their money off the few books they *do* sell during the initial release period (this is also why you keep seeing new edition after new edition appearing like clockwork every couple of years).
It would be impossible, of course, to convince students that buying used textbooks is *not* in their best interests over the long run. As a result, we’re now reading articles about how a typical students book costs are hitting $900/year.
E-books that expire is a way for publishers to take control of this situation. Missing from any of the complaints about e-books around here are two facts:
1. E-books are being offered at a 30% discount over hard books (which, quite frankly, isn’t good enough, it should be a 50-60% discount, but that’s a different issue).
2. Students still have the option of buying the hard version of the book if they want one that doesn’t “expire”.
As long as they have the choice (copy protected/expires, but cheaper, or hard but more expensive) no one can really complain.
Now if only we had an option of getting copy protection/cheaper or not copy protected/more expensive for software, audio, and video 🙂
“Missing from any of the complaints about e-books around here are two facts:
1. E-books are being offered at a 30% discount”
Perhaps you should read the posts more closely …