Blind people won the right to break eBook DRM, but they'll have to do it again
wired.com
wired.com
This is not only an injustice, but also a stupidity. What I do with something I paid for should concern only me as long as it's within my personal bounds (no redistribution, no profit, no business, etc.) Breaking DRM for personal use should not and cannot be illegal.
This is simply a problem of two opposing forced where both have legitimated reasons for their demand. And so far the weak side is losing. It would be better to find some compromise. Having tools and readers with official support for blind people should be the obvious solution. Why do they even need to fight against the publishers, instead of working with them together?
I understand its basically impossible to enforce all cases once they have the raw digital text, but does that mean we should ban OCR software and limit the access to high quality scanners in case they are used for copyright infringement? That seems an absurd cost to protect the existing business model. But is also the conclusion to banning DRM circumvention efforts. I think instead we can just go after people selling large number of copies like we always have and publishing will survive.
If your business model requires you to break other people’s property rights to something that you ostensibly sold them, in order to enforce it, it usually isn’t a viable business model! Except when you have a massive army of lawyers apparently.
Agreed, including fro other people's personal use.
Companies should be allowed to protect data by copyright or DRM, but not both, i.e. encasing something in DRM would remove its copyright.
DRM is frequently used not just to protect copyright, but to also completely control access beyond the purpose of copyright. See the recent Denuvo snafu for an example of this being done (presumably) by accident, noting that it can also be done on purpose to e.g. plan obsoletion. It doesn't just control copyright, it controls your actual rights to access content you legally own and hinges that access on running a service in perpetuity, which is not the least bit realistic. It's digital rights management but treats those rights like a privilege instead.
A simmiliar model could be applied to copyright, in exchange for legal protections, you must forgo technical protections.
If one uses technical means to protect information, parent poster proposes that courts should decline to protect it under the copyrights regime as well. Certainly, they should not protect both the information and whatever technical device is used to do private enforcement.
You can either use the public protection regime, or your own private protection device, but not both.
The issue at hand is that copyright implicitly includes an agreement to allow the work to pass into public domain after the copyright term expires. Technology that prevents that is anathema to the agreement. At the least, such schemes should fail-open, such that archived copies may be read as plaintext when the copyright term expires.
Also, can people really claim with a straight face that running a book through text-to-speech is the same as a real audiobook (that’s often a voice actor, right?)?
TTS is quickly improving. While it's not quite there yet, there are already ways to have any text read with anyones voice.
There also comes a point where even if it isn't perfect, it doesn't matter to the consumer who just wants the book read to them. Meanwhile, the publishers want the revenue from selling both versions of the book.
I'm also reminded of an incident years ago when I was working in a New York, and an agent (for a popular, well-paid writer) called our contract department from my desk phone to insist they remove the clause allowing the LOC to make audiobooks for the blind. As agent crimes go, it might not be the worst, but it always struck me for how egregiously petty it was.
Yeah, dream on. How long do you think this option will stay available to you? I sometimes get the impression that intelligent technical people on HN can't see ahead 5 minutes into the future, because being a peon without rights is something that conflicts with their self image as some technical sophisticate not subject to the same insults by our overlords as lowly non-techies. But your relative technical sophistication just means you'll lose some basic control over your privacy, data and possessions at t+ε rather than t.
edit: HN would rate limit me if I tried to reply to each explanation with thanks, so: thanks!
t+ε = some point in time a tiny fraction later
For as long as my reader can decrypt ebooks locally.
Because local vs cloud doesn't matter squat if all the devices your have locally are locked down completely and controlled by someone else.
This is a significant concern. We're seeing more and more non-free hardware in the market. Hardware designed to stop us from having access to data and from running our own software. Our computing freedom must be sacrificed in order to have any hope of enforcing these antiquated laws.
Even "unpublished" works can be recreated by those with talent, like Mozart and Allegri’s Miserere.
Why do you think so? If you can tell the difference between a family scene and a screening of a Hollywood film, why can't your camera? It doesn't have to perfect, and you can gradually tighten things down, which is exactly what has been happening for some time.
That's a big "if". I wouldn't guarantee to always be able to tell the difference. And there is a lot of non-Hollywood content which looks a lot more like something out of a Hollywood film than just "family scenes". (People do make their own films, you know, not just recordings of family events.)
> … why can't your camera?
That's asking a lot out of the kind of computing hardware you can reasonably fit into a camera. Even if you assume something like a smartphone with much more computing capacity than a standalone DSLR or mirrorless camera (and a correspondingly higher power budge / shorter battery life), you're not going to be able to train it to recognize every bit of Hollywood content and reliably distinguish it from non-Hollywood content offline. (Online recognition where the camera can upload content to the server for pattern recognition is a different matter, but something like this would presumably be done offline anyway.) The information requirements would be on the order of having all that content downloaded to the phone—never mind the processing involved.
Its not at all hard to believe that in 20-30 years when all the non-drm'ed version are sitting in landfills the analog "hole" will be closed because capture or playback devices will simply refuse to function when they detect watermarks when interacting with unsecured channels.
I acted when ultra-hd was "cracked" and grabbed one of the friendly drives, but its not been particularly useful because there seems to be far less effort in the public to assure that ultrahd disks are readable (look up the details) so its more likely to "miss" these days. The point being that its a giant game of back and forth, and while the "crackers" win everytime they crack something, they are mostly hobbiest fighting against corps with billions to employ engineers who spend their entire day coming up with ways to make it more difficult. Given few of us have electron microscopes and giant supercomputers, it seems really likely they will eventually win given that they learn to compensate every time something is cracked.
Plus, in the past it was pretty easy to buy PC's/etc that gave you full control, these days even with secure boot disabled, you might not be able to get into the lower levels of firmware because the machine simply refuses to accept unsigned updates. Flash it by hand and the bootstrap code integrated on the CPU die refuses to accept it.
That is the unsolvable problem that guarantees DRM will never be able to create a perfect protection device that allows the company to stuff the genie back into the bottle, or the cat back into the bag, at will.
edit: clarity
http://libgen.gs/ (NEW – November 2020)
http://libgen.rs – (NEW – October 2020).
https://libgen.is – (Working Again – May 2021).
http://libgen.st – (Re-directs to www.libgen.rs).
http://libgen.io/ (No longer working).
https://libgen.be/ (NEW – September 2020 – Search proxies to www.libgen.rs).
https://libgen.nl/ (NEW – September 2020 – Search proxies to www.libgen.rs).
If you are having trouble reaching with above Libgen URLs, try http://93.174.95.27 or http://185.39.10.101.
That leaves v1.21 as the "sweet spot", but most of the sites that used to host that installer EXE have mysteriously disappeared.
It's like saying you can break BluRay DRM by recording the screen with your phone camera.
The other part is that there isn't a single definitive KFX file for a title. If you have an Oasis and I have a Paperwhite and we both download the same book, I believe we get different KFX files. There's no reason to doubt that there will be future Kindle devices that are even better with respect to typography and so you will need to re-download your library for that device.
Today, KFX can sometimes be De-DRM'd but it's gotten to the point where it's a cat and mouse game. It works for a while then Amazon changes something and breaks it. I don't doubt that essentially uncrackable DRM is achievable.
The real fix is legislative.
A search engine that covers all the little sites selling DRM-free books would be nice!
(Publishers of Norwegian books fortunately tend to have just do watermarks, which is fine – you can read the book on whatever device you want, and your copy has a little note saying "ex libris Your Name" or something)
[1] https://www.kobo.com/ [2] https://play.google.com/store/books
My now wife and I spent hundreds of hours during undergrad converting text and graphs to plaintext for a grad student. Truly nasty formulas, with multiple integrals, fractions with many factors above and below the line, exponents all over.
While the legality was questionable at the time, I broke the DRM on the PDF of the book, copied everything to Sublime, removed line breaks, formatted footnotes with [1] formatting, labeled graphs.
Then I fired up GIMP and translated the images. When embossed on paper, braille is much larger than normal text, so I had to greatly simplify things.
The frustrating part was, on math books, there's a good chance it was LaTeX to begin with. The format we converted formulas to was almost identical to LaTeX.
Additionally, surely for undergrad level classes, multiple colleges were each paying undergrad students $1,000+ per course to make the materials accessible. A website where School 1 could see that School 2 had already converted Calculus 1 to braille and allowing payment to reimburse a proportional amount of the cost would be incredible helpful and maybe legal. In essence, $1,000 would be paid by School 1 to do the initial work, School 2 reimburses $500, then School 3 pays $333, split to the other two schools so ultimately, they're all in it for $333 rather than $1,000.
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I also worked with another student to build a molecule generator for 3d printers. Extensive use of the Blender Python API. Each bond type was a different shape connector, and the periodic table was divided by row and column to form a unique combination of scale and shape.
MacMolPlt [1] generated plaintext files that contained the position of each atom, bond connection types, and a list of coordinates for the electron clouds which could also be generated on top of the molecular structure, all exported to .STL for 3d printing.
It was a neat project, definitely opened my eyes to disabilities, and I became a more empathetic person because of it. Through some weird stuff with funding, it's sort of in copyright gray area. The disability office was paying to make things accessible for the student, not necessarily to build a tool that would be released to the greater world. It wouldn't be hard to replicate though. Back in 2011, I knew every 3d printer on campus and was kinda begging to print stuff while we tried things out. Now printing is trivially cheap and capacity is abundant - it would be 10x as easy and helpful.