[HN Gopher] Blind people won the right to break eBook DRM, but t...
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Blind people won the right to break eBook DRM, but they'll have to
do it again
Author : pabs3
Score : 287 points
Date : 2021-11-08 08:09 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| bserge wrote:
| Legally, I guess. Because thankfully, it's not hard to create PDF
| copies of any ebook even in 2021.
| helloworld11 wrote:
| 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 visible again.
| patrec wrote:
| > 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 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+e rather than t.
| Kye wrote:
| Asking as a non-sophisticate who has a mental block on most
| math education beyond 2nd grade: what does t+e mean?
|
| edit: HN would rate limit me if I tried to reply to each
| explanation with thanks, so: thanks!
| cyberbanjo wrote:
| Time + Elapsed Time. AKA not now, but eventually
| oleganza wrote:
| Epsilon stands for a "arbitrarily tiny bit" in calculus.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Current (t)ime plus some hand-waiving (e) Epsilon of change
| in time.
| patrec wrote:
| t = some point in time
|
| t+e = some point in time a tiny fraction later
| nemetroid wrote:
| > Yeah, dream on. How long do you think this option will stay
| available to you?
|
| For as long as my reader can decrypt ebooks locally.
| patrec wrote:
| 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.
| dv_dt wrote:
| For books the analog hole is probably widening with
| better ocr now than ever.
| patrec wrote:
| 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.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Money is one thing, but you can't exactly autoblur all
| text without a mass uproar. And at least for now I don't
| think it's feasible to keep enough updated storage and
| processing around photo devices to recognize temporary
| pics of all copyrighted texts either - even with heavily
| optimized hashes. But, I could be wrong in this
| assumption.
| helloworld11 wrote:
| Well, I can't predict the future, but so far I've managed to
| bypass every bullshit DRM control I've come across for text
| content and ebooks without too much trouble. It's mainly a
| question of choosing your mediums and hardware a bit more
| selectively. This doesn't make me blind to anything beyond
| the next 5 minutes and personally, i'm far from a technical
| person. Yes, the tech and media giants will keep looking for
| ways for screw people into becoming captive consumers who
| "buy" things that they don't even really own, but technology
| has so far done a remarkably good job of counteracting much
| of these attempts if one bothers to use it with a bit of
| creativity.
|
| edit: clarity
| vageli wrote:
| 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.
| StillBored wrote:
| 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.
| patrec wrote:
| > 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.
| nybble41 wrote:
| > 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > How long do you think this option will stay available to
| you?
|
| 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.
| logfromblammo wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Indeed. What an indignity. People "buy" books only to be forced
| to beg authorities for access to the items they paid for. It
| should be the other way around. It should be illegal to prevent
| this access.
| [deleted]
| helpfulmandrill wrote:
| Great. Now how about the rest of us?
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| >Even ebooks that are formatted correctly for TTS can have other
| issues. Math and science are the worst. Textbooks may be
| formatted for 100 percent accurate text-to-speech, only to falter
| when it comes to formulas, equations, charts, and tables. Those
| are typically rendered as images in an ebook, which would require
| publishers to take an additional step to record "alt text" for
| each individual figure--audio that would describe the image once
| encountered by a screen reader.
|
| 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.
|
| ----
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.swmath.org/software/7039
| laserlight wrote:
| > 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 personal bounds (no redistribution, no profit, no
| business, etc.) Breaking DRM for personal use should not and
| cannot be illegal.
| slightwinder wrote:
| 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 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?
| mattnewton wrote:
| 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.
| cabalamat wrote:
| > 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.
| ptudan wrote:
| I don't really track this argument. DRM generally exists to
| make it easier to protect copyright, no? They go hand in
| hand.
| sli wrote:
| 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.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| Think about patents. If you get a patent, you are legally
| protected from people stealing your patented idea for the
| lifetime of the patent. However, in exchange for that
| protection, you must make the idea public. In exchange for
| the protection of law, a patent holder sacrifices the
| protection of secrecy.
|
| A simmiliar model could be applied to copyright, in
| exchange for legal protections, you must forgo technical
| protections.
| logfromblammo wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah. This is what happens when laws are bought and paid for by
| corporations through lobbying. Their concerns just override all
| common sense.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Some years ago, I wrote the code specification for our ebook
| conversions. I made a priority of specifying good semantic
| structure, employ ARIA tags where needed, etc. I work for a
| university and there was yet no mandate for it, but it seemed
| only a matter of time. In the long run being a little ahead of
| the curve aid paid off, but now I need to go through and revise
| things to account for changing standards, and my own improved (I
| hope) understanding of what's needed.
|
| 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.
| werkjohann wrote:
| This is terrible, and while IANAL I'm confused why it doesn't
| fall under ADA requirements to provide accessible versions of
| materials - especially school materials.
|
| 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?)?
| NoahTheDuke wrote:
| I listened to all of Worm (https://parahumans.wordpress.com/)
| with TTS and while it wasn't ideal, it worked out well enough
| that I got a full understanding of the story. I'll note that I
| did this before the fan podcast to read the whole story lol.
| That's a much better option now.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| for books popular enough to get that treatment sure, I used to
| do volunteer reading to make audiobooks but had to quit when
| someone handed me the most pseudoscientific rubbish to read -
| it really felt like taking advantage - some book selling a
| lifestyle advice thing that would lead to immortality!!
| zozbot234 wrote:
| LibriVox is a well-known project in this space that by and
| large focuses on worthwhile stuff, not pseudoscientific
| rubbish.
| matwood wrote:
| > 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.
| JakeWesorick wrote:
| Where can I get these DRM free eBooks?
| paol wrote:
| The Calibre ebook managemet app has plugins available that can
| strip both Amazon and Adobe DRM.
| RNCTX wrote:
| Also does a very good job of metadata management and format
| conversion. I don't know of a better solution. With Calibre
| you can buy wherever you like and maintain the format and
| metadata system you prefer.
| causi wrote:
| Or it used to. Last time I tried it wasn't able to do Amazon
| anymore.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| It still works for Amazon but it doesn't really work for
| books in their newer KFX format. It's best to use an older
| version of Kindle for PC or use their download and transfer
| to USB if you have a physical eInk Kindle to get an AZW3
| file which should unlock no problem.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Installers for older versions are becoming increasingly
| elusive, I've found. Anything newer than Kindle for PC
| v1.26 and DeDRM can't break the encryption. Installers
| for v1.17 or v1.19 can still be found, but on Linux those
| versions can't connect to Amazon because one of the SSL
| certs used by the app has expired.
|
| That leaves v1.21 as the "sweet spot", but most of the
| sites that used to host that installer EXE have
| mysteriously disappeared.
| Jiro wrote:
| You can get the missing certificate from the links in htt
| ps://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=342186&uid
| ... .
| criddell wrote:
| That workaround gets you the text but it's missing a lot
| of the recent typographic improvements. It's fine for
| extracting text for TTS, but isn't ideal if what you are
| trying to do is maintain a DRM free archive of books
| you've purchased.
|
| It's like saying you can break BluRay DRM by recording
| the screen with your phone camera.
| sbst32 wrote:
| What kind of typographic improvements do you have in
| mind?
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| 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.
| sbst32 wrote:
| The point is the KFX format does have all that natively.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| And my point is that some of it not native (it's handled
| by the renderer) and it's possible to get back or similar
| enough (precomputing hyphenation).
| criddell wrote:
| If you're willing to do a bunch of work, you may be able
| to recreate something close to the original KFX. AFAIK
| you won't get kerning though. That seems to be tied to
| the renderer used for KFX files.
|
| 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.
| makeworld wrote:
| Z-Library is the best.
| magikabula wrote:
| The best source for ebooks if definitely eMule
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Tor: https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/torforge-e-books-are-now-
| drm-...
| sohkamyung wrote:
| Libreture maintains a list of DRM free stores [1].
|
| [1] https://www.libreture.com/bookshops/
| unhammer wrote:
| That's a good list. I've found some stuff I was looking for
| at Bloomsbury. Tor is probably good if you're into sci-
| fi/fantasy. But if you're looking for a specific book in
| English it's typically very hard to find a place to pay for a
| DRM-free e-book.
|
| 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)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| the pirate bay & friends.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| libgen for books. The pirate bay theoretically covers
| everything, but good luck finding books there.
| xiconfjs wrote:
| 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 - 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.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| I've literally always just grabbed the latest working URL
| from the Wikipedia article's sidebar.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis
| helloworld11 wrote:
| Libgen is great for older literature and non-fiction books
| of all kinds, but for modern fiction it sucks.
| hkt wrote:
| Really? What have you struggled to find? I've found
| libgen enormously helpful.
| helloworld11 wrote:
| Maybe it's just my pop fiction preferences but if I
| search for any sort of modern horror or sci fi fiction, I
| just can't seem to find any content. Pirate bay on the
| other hand? No problem. Like I said though, almost any
| modern non fiction and a great deal of older fiction
| literature is definitely there, so I'm definitely not
| criticizing libgen. It's mostly wonderful, though one
| worries about malware luring in downloads, but on this
| maybe im just being paranoid.
| Klaster_1 wrote:
| Besides TPB, is there a libgen for audiobooks? Audible
| blocks lots of books here and the prices are honestly quite
| steep. TPB often doesn't have what I was looking for, not
| even something obscure.
| sbst32 wrote:
| Not actually a joke: audiobookbay.ws
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