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Blind people won the right to break eBook DRM, but they'll have to do it again

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Re: Blind people won the right to break eBook DRM, but they'll have to do it again

#51

Post by mattnewton »

slightwinder wrote: post #44
laserlight wrote: post #13

> Although the exemption protects people who circumvent digital copyright protections for the sake of accessibility — by using third-party programs to lift text and save it in a different file format, for example — that it's even necessary strikes many as a fundamental injustice. 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 p…

Nobody really cares what people do locally on their own. But companies do care when people share this local work with others. And any tool for accessibility can be used for this in one way or another. 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 officia…

If companies care when people share the work with others means that the act they want to prevent is breaking copyright this way, and it becomes a question of enforcement.

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.

Re: Blind people won the right to break eBook DRM, but they'll have to do it again

#52

Post by sli »

ptudan wrote: post #50
cabalamat wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Breaking DRM for personal use should not and cannot be illegal 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.

I don't really track this argument. DRM generally exists to make it easier to protect copyright, no? They go hand in hand.

The argument doesn't really track but it's very much worth examining DRM and its relationship with/effects on copyright and the rights of consumers, anyway.

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.

Re: Blind people won the right to break eBook DRM, but they'll have to do it again

#53

Post by patrec »

dv_dt wrote: post #37
patrec wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fahrenheit 451 style, right? Because local vs cloud doesn't matter squat if all the devices your have locally are locked down completely and controlled by someone else.

For books the analog hole is probably widening with better ocr now than ever.

The last remaining analog hole may soon be people. Recording devices are basically already digital, and there is no fundamental difficulty in embedding enough pattern recognition to ensures that you don't replicate material that's either thoughtcrime or the valuable IP of Elsevier, RIAA or some similar benefactor of humanity. Photoshop reportedly already refuses to work on scenes that contain money.

Re: Blind people won the right to break eBook DRM, but they'll have to do it again

#54

Post by patrec »

vageli wrote: post #48
patrec wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if I buy ebooks, i'll just go ahead and strip their DRM without giving a damn who says no 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…

As long as the content is presented to a human for consumption, I think it will be possible to duplicate it, even if it is just recording the screen with a camera or something. Even "unpublished" works can be recreated by those with talent, like Mozart and Allegri’s Miserere.

> As long as the content is presented to a human for consumption, I think it will be possible to duplicate it,

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.

Re: Blind people won the right to break eBook DRM, but they'll have to do it again

#55

Post by logfromblammo »

cabalamat wrote: post #46
laserlight wrote: post #13

> Although the exemption protects people who circumvent digital copyright protections for the sake of accessibility — by using third-party programs to lift text and save it in a different file format, for example — that it's even necessary strikes many as a fundamental injustice. 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 p…

> Breaking DRM for personal use should not and cannot be illegal 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.

Much like one cannot have a patented trade secret. The grant of patent requires disclosure, and using the court system to publicly resolve disputes.

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.

Re: Blind people won the right to break eBook DRM, but they'll have to do it again

#56

Post by logfromblammo »

patrec wrote: post #23
helloworld11 wrote: post #17

Fuck having to ask for the "right". If they bought their digital books, they should absolutely be free to do whatever they like with them for personal usability. I can understand the legal rights position here, revolving around bringing attention to the issue of these idiotic rules, but if I buy ebooks, i'll just go ahead and strip their DRM without giving a damn who says no. The absurdity of DRM laws is really made…

> but if I buy ebooks, i'll just go ahead and strip their DRM without giving a damn who says no 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…

Forever. DRM is created under the cryptographically insane belief that one can treat a person as an eavesdropper at any time after they have been an authorized recipient.

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.

Re: Blind people won the right to break eBook DRM, but they'll have to do it again

#57

Post by salamandersauce »

criddell wrote: post #49
sbst32 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of typographic improvements do you have in mind?

Stuff like drop caps, kerning that isn't terrible, hyphenation, and better word spacing. None of it matters if you are feeding the text to a speech synthesizer, but it can make a difference when reading.

Some of that stuff you can get back by using an ePub version and reader from the AZW3 file which can typically be done using KindleUnpack. Some of it is less the file format and more the rendering engine used and they simply haven't bothered to backport it to their AZW3 renderers. Amazon does AFAIK precompute some stuff like hyphenation but not everything.

Re: Blind people won the right to break eBook DRM, but they'll have to do it again

#58

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

xiconfjs wrote: post #26
thaumasiotes wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

libgen for books. The pirate bay theoretically covers everything, but good luck finding books there.

Try these Libgen proxy/mirror links: http://libgen.gs/ (NEW – November 2020) http://gen.lib.rus.ec http://libgen.rs – (NEW – October 2020). https://libgen.is – (Working Again – May 2021). http://libgen.st – (Re-directs to www.libgen.rs). http://libgen.li https://libgen.lc http://libgen.io/ (No longer working). https://libgen.be/ (NEW – September 2020 – Search proxies to www.libgen.rs). https://libgen.nl/ (NEW – Septe…

I've literally always just grabbed the latest working URL from the Wikipedia article's sidebar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis

Re: Blind people won the right to break eBook DRM, but they'll have to do it again

#59

Post by nybble41 »

patrec wrote: post #54
vageli wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as the content is presented to a human for consumption, I think it will be possible to duplicate it, even if it is just recording the screen with a camera or something. Even "unpublished" works can be recreated by those with talent, like Mozart and Allegri’s Miserere.

> As long as the content is presented to a human for consumption, I think it will be possible to duplicate it, 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.

> If you can tell the difference between a family scene and a screening of a Hollywood film, …

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.

Re: Blind people won the right to break eBook DRM, but they'll have to do it again

#60

Post by StillBored »

vageli wrote: post #48
patrec wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if I buy ebooks, i'll just go ahead and strip their DRM without giving a damn who says no 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…

As long as the content is presented to a human for consumption, I think it will be possible to duplicate it, even if it is just recording the screen with a camera or something. Even "unpublished" works can be recreated by those with talent, like Mozart and Allegri’s Miserere.

Until you have a camera that detects watermarks and refuses to record. Its already there with cinavia which I guess has functional workarounds now, but it took, what 3-4 years (?) before a remover showed up that didn't garble the audio.

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.

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