posted by
n1
on Friday June 27 2014, @05:07AM
from the accept-these-standardized-terms-and-we'll-take-care-of-everything dept.
from the accept-these-standardized-terms-and-we'll-take-care-of-everything dept.
The ongoing spat between publisher Hachette and Amazon has been making the round lately on news sites. Cory Doctorow points out the blunder Hachette made when it allowed Amazon to digitally encrypt their book titles with DRM (Digital Rights Management).
Under U.S. law Hachette is unable to release an application to remove the DRM from their customers' books which would allow their customers to migrate away from Amazon's Kindle. Only Amazon is legally able to remove the DRM placed on their book titles. In essence, by trapping their customers in Amazon's DRM, they have, in turn, been ensnared themselves.
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Agreeing to Amazon DRM Cost Publisher Control
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @05:29AM
Can't Hachette provide a way for customers to download a DRM-free copy of their books?
I guess authenticating oneself with a serial number in the DRM'd file should be possible, right?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @05:51AM
You assume Hachette kept original copies and didn't just upload everything to The Cloud for safekeeping. Everybody trusts The Cloud.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @06:06AM
IIRC, amazon does not share purchaser information with publishers. They get aggregate counts and of course their share of the sales.. But they don't get any information that would allow them to authenticate a buyer outside of the kindle system.
It has been many years since I first heard that, it could well be different now. But I bet it isn't.
(Score: 1) by Horse With Stripes on Friday June 27 2014, @12:06PM
Great idea. Here's how Hachette verifies that the reader has already bought an Amazon DRMd version of the book: the reader uploads their Amazom DRMd file. The Amazon DRM should be easy enough to parse in order to extract the unique user ID so they can verify if this is a dupe (from pirates, arrrgg!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @05:57AM
Because that's what DRM does, fucks everybody.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @06:32AM
Goddamn hipsters and their DRM. Back in my day, we called it what it is: Copy Protection. Companies sold software to defeat copy protection, but we didn't pay for it, no we made free copies of that too. We copied what we wanted, when we wanted, who we wanted! Back in those days we didn't have free open source software, we only had pirated commercial shit. Those days were fucking terrible! May they never come again.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @01:40PM
Hence why many advocates say that DRM really stands for "Digital Restrictions Management" (rather than the official "Digital Rights Management"). Whatever we call it, it's important not to be led to believe that this is about copy protection.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @02:58PM
I believe this old infographic explains DRM rather well https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2747/4368652757_763452059a_o.jpg [staticflickr.com]
(Score: 3) by The Archon V2.0 on Friday June 27 2014, @03:27PM
It's digital rights. Their rights to stick their fingers where they don't belong.
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Friday June 27 2014, @06:35AM
A few minutes of web searching will find third party plugins to Calibre that remove anybodies DRM for the rightfull owner of an Amazon purchased eBook. These plugins are not made by or approved by Calibre, and you have to download ebooks with an approved amazon account and app, but you are then forever free of the DRM. Same for epub books.
If you like ebooks and haven't discovered Calibre, its great. Check it out at calibre-ebook.com
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by romlok on Friday June 27 2014, @08:03AM
I bought A Dance With Dragons ebook (not from Amazon). Adobe DRM. "Great", thought I; with a touch of sarcasm; a chance to try out Calibre's DRM-stripping.
Except it's not Calibre removing the DRM. It's not even a Calibre plugin. What you have to do is download some software from Adobe (which apparently works in Wine), which the Calibre plugin interacts with somehow. But to actually use the Adobe software, you need to sign up for an Adobe account or somesuch.
"Fuck that", thought I, I already had to sign up to a store buy the fucking book in the first place.
Fortunately, the first search result I got when looking to buy the book in the first place was a direct link to download the un-DRMed version of the book. So guess what I downloaded, despite the chapter list looking rather amateurish.
That said, the ebook reader I actually used was tied to my store account, so I could read the book without having to install or sign up for any additional Adobe bullshit. And as it turns out, the "amateurish" chapter list wasn't just an artefact of the "unofficial" version.
To hell with the lot of them.
(Score: 2) by lx on Friday June 27 2014, @09:43AM
Of course you have to download your DRMed copy first before you can strip out the protection.
These are stopgap measures but they make buying DRM content bearable (not fun but bearable) for me. Still, no functional crack = no sale.
(Score: 2) by WillAdams on Friday June 27 2014, @01:04PM
Yep. I'm still raging that when I bought Robert Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ from the Sony Bookstore it was essentially unreadable, so rife w/ errors that I spent the weekend proofreading it.
A few typos in the Tor version of _Space Cadet_ from the Sony bookstore:
inside front cover --- pricing from hard cover ($23.95, ($31.95 CAN))
``to danger-filled advenTures''
(t should not be capitalized)
``the Space Academy Young men such as Matt and Tex,''
(missing period in-between Academy and Young)
Page listing other titles:
``Requiem Space Cadet''
(missing new paragraph between Requiem and Space)
Copyright page:
``This book is printed on acid-free paper''
(yeah, right)
Contents:
6 "Reading, and 'Riting and 'Rithmetic---"
(apostrophe missing before Reading, should be curly, not stick --- this happens throughout the book)
(I think something is wrong w/ the ship name Aes Triplex)
pg. 11-12
``air stood Hay-worth Hall.''
(discretionary hyphen wrongly instantiated has hyphen)
pg. 12
``gave half to Jar?man''
(discretionary hyphen converted to question mark)
pg. 17-18
``exercise it, in quired''
(extraneous space in inquired)
pg. 22-23
``score showing in it---"yjT''
(score should be a number --- there are a number of instances of the old-style figures being mangled as letters)
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday June 27 2014, @08:54PM
Looks like you got a poor scan repackaged as an ebook, rather than a good scan, or a direct to Ebook generation.
Blame Sony.
Its now extremely rare to find such crap in modern ebooks, because they are generated from the same (digital) content sent to the printers.
I've bought ebooks of books that I have in printed form. I got them from the same source (Barns and Noble), and they contained the same errors in both versions.
Older works still occasionally get a few, but even these are getting clean scans these days. Anything from Gutenberg is usually nearly perfect.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday June 27 2014, @08:42PM
Nothing in my Calibre runs anything in wine. It runs perfectly in Linux. (Also in windows).
I suggest you got the wrong plugin, because mine works fine.
And epub with Adobe DRM is kind of the norm, but probably the easiest to remove.
Adobe simply give you an ID. (An encryption token if you will). That's all it does, and once you have the ID you can decrypt books off line, on many different devices (and with Calibre).
The same adobe ID can be used to get library books, (But then Overdrive Media does get tracking information, at least to the extent of knowing which books are checked out for that library. Librarians, being a rather feisty group with regard to privacy, I suspect that Overdrive does not know who actually gets what books. When you download from the library, you just get a certificate file, that allows your reader to fetch and decrypt the book.
(Overdrive, being stymied by libraries not wanting to tell them WHO has which books has recently added syncing of your position between devices. Which suggests they have their own tracking of who reads what if you turn on that feature.)
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 27 2014, @02:07PM
I agree that that is a very practical solution to the problem, but it's not a solution Hachette can recommend as that would throw them into the legal landmines of inducing people to engage in illegal activity. And make no mistake - stripping DRM from your ebooks, even with the publishers blessing, is illegal circumvention of DRM. Just like ripping your DVD collection. That it doesn't normally land you on the wrong end of a lawsuit is because (A) as long as you're not redistributing nobody is likely to notice or care, and possibly (B) nobody who does care is likely to press the issue for fear of having public outcry get the law re-written into something more sane.
Get a corporation publicly advocating such an activity though, and folks are going to take notice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @06:40AM
... hung on his own gallows. ( Holy Bible... Book of Esther ).
The whole gist of this to me was showing how when one plots to ensnare another, one gets hung up in his own machinery that he made to mess up someone else's life.
( I am going to run and duck for cover because I referenced a religious text... consider deities what you will, as God is apparently something different to each of us, but I still consider that old book full of sage advice; however its definitely not a get-rich-quick read. )
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @06:53AM
And no good deed goes unpunished either. Make people's lives easier though automation? You'll automate your way out of your job. The lesson is never do anything for anyone. God bless God.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @07:58AM
> The whole gist of this to me was showing how when one plots to ensnare another,
> one gets hung up in his own machinery that he made to mess up someone else's life.
The trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead. [youtube.com]
> I am going to run and duck for cover because I referenced a religious text.
Why? The problem isn't talking about myths, it is preaching that those myths are more than just stories.
Although I could see someone who is a religious extremist getting pissed that you did reference their book without using it as an opportunity to preach. The enemy of the extremist isn't the atheist, it is the moderate.
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @08:02AM
Preach that moderation, brother! We need some extreme compromise up in here! Testify!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @10:09AM
Actually, there is a lot of controversy whether the Book of Esther in the Holy Bible actually happened, or - like Aesop's Fables, was coined to illustrate a point.
Yes I did reference the Holy Book. However I do not like to preach, not from moderation, but from ignorance.
Its an ethics thing with me... before I go off pushing something, I have to know with all my heart that what I am pontificating on is true, because if others are anything like me, they will also need proof. Even if I "know it with all my heart", that does not make it fact...not by a long shot. It just means that if you question me on my belief system, I have reasons to believe as I do. Reasons I interpret as statistically significant enough for me to accept them as true.
Mark Twain put it this way... "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.".
I have been there and done that. More than once. And knowing how wrong I can be, even with the best of intentions, I realize I may well be creating far more harm than good. Hell, I fell for "peak oil" hook, line, sinker, tackle box, and the fisherman. And I still believe we are not out of the woods. However all I see seems to show me wrong again.
My belief in anything is not proof. I am commanded by the Bible not to give false witness. I have a hard time witnessing that which I have not experienced. I know I am supposed to take stuff on faith, but in so doing, I am also being gullible to false teaching, which I am also told to be vigilant.
I need to base my belief system on something more than superstition.
Preachers basing their messages on superstition to me cause far more human anguish than they are worth. It seems like they are just hocking up scripts like a script kiddie, scripts which are known to make people grace a collection plate.
I guess everybody's had enough of my religious ranting. My relationship with whatever it is that made me concerns me a lot, but there is so much lying going on in the religious community, a lot of it deliberate, some of it well-meaning but just downright wrong. And I know I could dedicate the rest of my life to the study of theology and my efforts would probably be less useful than calculating pi to three more digits...
I'm Damned if I do, Damned if I don't.
Guess when I die, I'll have to let God himself sort it all out. God knows I tried.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @01:07PM
Hell, I fell for "peak oil" hook
Peak oil is real. You may, however, have misunderstood what peak oil is: It's not the point where oil production ends. It's the point when there's the absolute maximum oil production.
Peak oil is inevitable because there are finite oil resources on earth. There may be uncertainty on when it is reached, but you cannot avoid eventually reaching it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @12:15PM
Forever those of us against copy protection have been stating that it: 1) does nothing to deter piracy, and 2) only harms those who legally purchase the materials.
And most publishers did not listen: "but... but... but... illegal copying... ..."
The good news here is that this is an instance of the copy protection biting the correct party, the one attempting to ram copy protection down everyone else's throat.
And that is what it is going to take before the "but... but... illegal copying..." sky is falling dolts are finally silenced. To have the copy protection bite the ass of the ones worried about the illegal copying in the first place.
The music industry was the first to finally pull their head out of their ass. Apple's itunes was the "copy protection" that bit their ass hard enough to convince them to drop copy protection.
The outcome here will likely end up being at least one of the big publishers giving up on copy protection. With it, they become a servant of the retailer, without it, the retailer becomes their servant. Eventually they will begin to see the distinction.
(Score: 1) by chewbacon on Friday June 27 2014, @01:04PM
They won't learn a damn thing from this. DRM will continue to fuck people over... just the people who buy it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by evilviper on Friday June 27 2014, @01:50PM
I don't believe this is at all accurate. The text of the DMCA talks about circumvention of DRM put on a work by the copyright holder. If Hachette owns the content, they have every right to circumvent the DRM.
Even if Amazon claims copyright on the specific formatting, or added images or such, Hachette could easily offer a DRM-removal tool that strips any formatting (or pictures, or anything else specific that Amazon may own), if that's a concern.
And being the copyright holder, Hatchette could easily offer DRM-free copies of their content for download. To prevent giving away the farm, they might need a simple web page where customers put in their Amazon order number and Hatchette somehow uses it to verify which ebook(s) they did purchase. Or maybe something simpler, like asking them to type-in a randomly-selected line somewhere in the book, verbatim, to conclusively prove they possess the content already.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @01:51PM
No. DRM stands for Digital Restrictions Management. It is about restricting what I can do with my own property, taking *away* my rights.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday June 27 2014, @05:38PM
A bit off topic, but a related anecdote. I am a college professor and we just recently selected(*) a new textbook for an introductory programming class. Price around $100 (typical, overpriced textbook). Aha, but it's available as an ebook, great! Then I saw the price - hey, at least it's not more than the dead-tree price, but it's still $80.
As crazy as the music, movie and publishing industries are, the textbook industry is even crazier. I had a quick look around and in under 5 minutes I had found a pirated copy online, on a torrent site that didn't even require registration. I can guess that most of my students will pirate the book.
Of course, I can hear the cry from the publishers, how piracy is destroying their business. Well, no. Rapacious prices and idiotic DRM are killing your business. Price that ebook at $10, and no one will bother to pirate it. Your sales will jump by a huge factor - probably earning you more money than you make today. But no...these industries seemingly cannot change. They insist on dooming themselves.
---
(*) Actually, I prefer using no textbook for programming, because there are so many excellent online resources. However, there are several sections of the course, they have to be taught all the same, and the other instructors cannot imagine a course without a textbook.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.