EBook Sellers Strike Deal To Share Customer Details With Anti-Piracy Outfit

[dixiegrrrrl]

A new digital distribution agreement for eBook platforms will formalize a system for identifying customers whose purchases later appear on the Internet. The deal will see eBook sellers watermark digital downloads and log them against specific customer accounts. That data will be kept for a minimum of two years just in case books appear on file-sharing sites. If they do, vendors will hand over customer details to rightsholders and anti-piracy outfit BREIN.

Watermarking has traditionally been used to describe a relatively ancient method of introducing patterns or information into paper. These markings are often applied to items of value, such as banknotes or certificates, in order to make the counterfeiting process more difficult.
In recent years ‘watermarking’ has been expanded into the digital domain. All kinds of digital media can be quietly marked in order to identify the origins of the content, which has proven particularly useful with the ‘dots’ to be found in Hollywood movies. By tracking these marks within pirate copies of movies, studios are able to identify which theater they were ‘cammed’ in.
More:
http://torrentfreak.com/down-torrent-pirates-130813/

[krawhitham]

2. Will only work on morons

An .epub file is just a set of XHTML files inside a PKZIP container.

There is no way to watermark these files in a way they can not be removed and still have it work on existing E-Readers


So unless a moron uploads his bought e-book without removing the watermark this will have zero impact.


I'm sure Calibre will have a plugin to remove the watermarks, they currently have plugins to remove DRM

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. Calibre was my first thought.

If you use Calibre to change, say, a mobi file to an epub or pdf file, would the watermark be lost in the transfer?

[cprise]

4. Its very hard to remove watermarking of this sort

Its not like a little emblem in the corner of the screen that you can use an 'erase' tool on (a different, old-fashioned type of watermark). Nor is it merely a tag appendage added to the start/end of a file like an ID3 tag. Probably all semblance of formatting, spacing, and capitalization would need to be removed just for starters... anything that can be varied within the text without changing the meaning of the words. I even read something about introducing very sparse misspellings as a way to encode a customer ID that can be tracked; a thorough watermark removal program would have to discard all the words that it could not correct in a story.

Modern watermarking techniques are insidious. You have to practically destroy the content to remove the identification, and its not like obstructive DRM which has an underlying logical fallacy that allows it to be decisively defeated.

So people who let someone crack the DRM'ed media they recently purchased, or who had their books and media surreptitiously copied, are now being ratted out to the deputies of the intellectual property police (and kids, copyright violation has been transformed from a civil to a criminal offence, so welcome to the new 'War On Drugs').

The thing about cracking these days is, if you do it then you could be hurting the person(s) who originally bought the content IF that copy ever leaves your hands.