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iBooks DRM has been cracked.

the-digital-reader.com

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Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.

#12
post #10
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that Netflix has original exclusive content, can we look forward to someone hacking the Netflix stream?

I've been told there are torrents of exclusive Netflix content.

Are they decrypted from the stream or screencapped and transcoded? If it's the latter, then that's trivial and doesn't require breaking anything, it just causes a good bit of degradation.

Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.

#13

I’ve always thought that DRM only remained unbroken so long as no hacker was interested in breaking it This has always been true; why break the weak DRM on a low-quality 'Netflix' stream when you can do an HDTV rip or even a Blu-ray rip? But the instant you create exclusive content that everyone wants on such a service, the DRM will be broken faster than you can say "DMCA". The downside of this is it lets companies d…

This hasn't been the case with Blu-Ray, right? We've gone weeks and weeks without breaks in whatever the most recent updates to BD+ are.

Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.

#14
post #13

I’ve always thought that DRM only remained unbroken so long as no hacker was interested in breaking it This has always been true; why break the weak DRM on a low-quality 'Netflix' stream when you can do an HDTV rip or even a Blu-ray rip? But the instant you create exclusive content that everyone wants on such a service, the DRM will be broken faster than you can say "DMCA". The downside of this is it lets companies d…

This hasn't been the case with Blu-Ray, right? We've gone weeks and weeks without breaks in whatever the most recent updates to BD+ are.

Blu-ray is an interesting case; the 'pirates' seem to have gotten quite lazy because SlySoft has been doing all their work for them.

Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.

#15
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hasn't been the case with Blu-Ray, right? We've gone weeks and weeks without breaks in whatever the most recent updates to BD+ are.

Blu-ray is an interesting case; the 'pirates' seem to have gotten quite lazy because SlySoft has been doing all their work for them.

There's also the odd case where BD was never properly broken, because it's never been needed. People have just depended on broken players, which has worked remarkably well so far.

Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.

#16
post #8

Great, now I honestly feel safe about buying from the iBookstore! This can only lead to an increase in sales. Did they not learn anything from the music industry? Sales have only gone up since they scrapped DRM! (citation needed)

I'm interested to see if this will be true for books as well. Taken in a continuum of attention required, you start with music, then to movies,and finally to books. As a result my ability to consume books is one to two orders of magnitude lower than music. That seems like it could impact the economics of discover-then-purchase that music "piracy"/"free marketing" has wrought.

Regardless, I think it will always be good for the long tail authors.

Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.

#17
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blu-ray is an interesting case; the 'pirates' seem to have gotten quite lazy because SlySoft has been doing all their work for them.

There's also the odd case where BD was never properly broken, because it's never been needed. People have just depended on broken players, which has worked remarkably well so far.

I think this is what shows that DRM really is hopeless. For DRM to work, it has to work every time. For DRM to be broken, it only needs to fail once. After one guy has extracted the media, it can then be distributed to the world even if nobody else can break the DRM.

Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.

#18
post #17
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the odd case where BD was never properly broken, because it's never been needed. People have just depended on broken players, which has worked remarkably well so far.

I think this is what shows that DRM really is hopeless. For DRM to work, it has to work every time. For DRM to be broken, it only needs to fail once. After one guy has extracted the media, it can then be distributed to the world even if nobody else can break the DRM.

Not really. The content providers only have to hold the line (a) on high-quality and (b) during the new-release window. It's true that eventual failure is inevitable, but the economic case for DRM doesn't rely on permanent protection.

Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.

#19
post #6

I’ve always thought that DRM only remained unbroken so long as no hacker was interested in breaking it This has always been true; why break the weak DRM on a low-quality 'Netflix' stream when you can do an HDTV rip or even a Blu-ray rip? But the instant you create exclusive content that everyone wants on such a service, the DRM will be broken faster than you can say "DMCA". The downside of this is it lets companies d…

Now that Netflix has original exclusive content, can we look forward to someone hacking the Netflix stream?

Since the pirates are going to re-encode anyway, there is no reason they have to do that -- Netflix is software, and they can just grab the image and sound data after the program has decoded them.

Re: iBooks DRM has been cracked.

#20
post #2

I can confirm that yes, it has been cracked. Happily it is (as far as I know) not yet illegal for me to remove DRM protection from books I've purchased, although I'm sure that will change soon.

I think in the USA, the DMCA has made it illegal to break the copy protection on copyrighted work?

It may or may not be against the iBook EULA, which might make you in breech of contract, or make you guilty of using a computer system without agreement.

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