41–50 of 72 posts
This is so funny to me. "We might have gotten around to making our software accessible, if it weren't for you meddling kids!"
Do book drms even make sens? i can understand games, but how do you encrypt words that are meant to be read. People used to record music on the radio. It seems easier to ocr a book and generate text that way.
The only time to directly threaten legal action is when you don't think legal action will achieve your goal, and you've got nothing else. Otherwise, there is no benefit to threatening legal action. Sure, you can imply it, but you gain nothing by showing those cards.
In many actual US jurisdictions (and presumably beyond), it's such a pervasive problem that there are now explicit "anti-SLAPP" laws on the book against just that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you even need Thorium for this? If the files are just AES-encrypted and the links are there, as the linked article suggest, it seems that it would be easy to create a standalone script to download and decrypt these.
(OP here) I discussed how the DRM works in an earlier blog post - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/03/some-thoughts-on-lcp-ebook-... Essentially, the key for decrypting the files is made up of the book owner's passphrase and the super-secret key embedded in the closed-source binary. I wasn't able to reverse engineer the binary or extract that key.
> You can, for sure, publish information relative to your discoveries to the extent UK laws allow. After study, we'll do our best to make the technology more robust. If your discourse represents a circumvention of this technical protection measure, we'll command a take-down as a standard procedure. Disgusting behaviour, as expected from the publishing industry I suppose. This "EDRLab" outfit appears to be little more…
They make a software to help libraries lend ebooks for free. Without their DRM you either wouldn’t be able to borrow ebooks because publishers would never agree to it, or would be limited to kindle/libby to read them. They’re not perfect but how is it bad behavior to say you’ll issue a takedown notice if your copyright material is republished? I don’t really understand why they’re being treated as the enemy here?
Which copyrighted material is TFA republishing?
And where's the takedown notice? So far, there only seems to be an attempt of emotional blackmail ("take this down or we'll have to deprioritize our accessibility efforts").
> They make a software to help libraries lend ebooks for free.
Free to the library (?), but not free to the reader. (Readers indirectly pay for it via certification fees paid by the ereader vendor.)
It might well be the lesser evil compared to Kindle (closed ecosystem) and Adobe Digital Editions (words cannot describe the pain), but it's still a DRM scheme and as such restricts reading hardware/software choice, so I can see how its mere existence upsets people.
Do book drms even make sens? i can understand games, but how do you encrypt words that are meant to be read. People used to record music on the radio. It seems easier to ocr a book and generate text that way.
It makes a lot of sense from a lock-in perspective, though I'm not certain why that leads to publishers insisting on it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you even need Thorium for this? If the files are just AES-encrypted and the links are there, as the linked article suggest, it seems that it would be easy to create a standalone script to download and decrypt these.
(OP here) I discussed how the DRM works in an earlier blog post - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/03/some-thoughts-on-lcp-ebook-... Essentially, the key for decrypting the files is made up of the book owner's passphrase and the super-secret key embedded in the closed-source binary. I wasn't able to reverse engineer the binary or extract that key.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I find myself uncomfortably on the side of AI bros like Sam Altman who argue for the expansion of the fair use doctrine Why? Are you training LLMs? I highly doubt they'll fight a pro-consumer fight completely incidental to their objectives (if not detracting: don't need to buy the source textbook if you can ask ChatGPT about its contents as soon as it's released).
In a courthouse in the near future: "So, yeronner, I think you will agree that I was well within my rights to share a torrent of the new Batman movie, not for people to watch but so they could train their LLMS on it."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I find myself uncomfortably on the side of AI bros like Sam Altman who argue for the expansion of the fair use doctrine Why? Are you training LLMs? I highly doubt they'll fight a pro-consumer fight completely incidental to their objectives (if not detracting: don't need to buy the source textbook if you can ask ChatGPT about its contents as soon as it's released).
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Anything done to strengthen fair use is in my opinion a positive outcome. Happy to see copyright holders go toe-to-toe against a bully their own size. If both OpenAI and entrenched IP interests get bloodied in this fight, it's a win-win.
I would expect most AI companies to be more than happy to throw consumers under the bus if it affords them a carve-out serving their own narrow interests.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(OP here) I discussed how the DRM works in an earlier blog post - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/03/some-thoughts-on-lcp-ebook-... Essentially, the key for decrypting the files is made up of the book owner's passphrase and the super-secret key embedded in the closed-source binary. I wasn't able to reverse engineer the binary or extract that key.
The key is b3a07c4d42880e69398e05392405050efeea0664c0b638b7c986556fa9b58d77b31a40eb6a4fdba1e4537229d9f779daad1cc41ee968153cb71f27dc9696d40f