It took longer than I expected but the day has finally come: The Amazon Kindle has been hacked, its copyright protection scheme rendered inoperable. Application of the hack allows owners to transfer ebooks on their machine to any other device as a PDF file.
DRM has long divided opinion. While rights holders regard it as a crucial tool to protect copyright, consumers tend to hate it because it limits what can be done with content.
“DRM is not an effective way of preventing copying nor is it a good way of making sales. There isn’t a customer out there saying ‘what I need is an electronic book that does less,” novelist and co-editor of the Boing Boing blog Cory Doctorow told the BBC when the Kindle was launched.
As soon as a new DRM system is active, hackers begin to try and break it.
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Comments (1)
I love this Ubisoft/DRM/patent application discussion. There are different ways of preventing software piracy, including the one applied for below. No points for guessing why I love writing about it. It is effective antipiracy without the overreaching DRM.Patent title: PREVENTION OF SOFTWARE PIRACY USING UNIQUE INTERNAL INTELLIGENCE WITH EVERY SOFTWARE APPLICATION COPY USPTO Application Number 11678137Basically, each and every copy of a protected program gets it's own internal intelligence, interpretable only by itself, which includes time of program creation, etc., etc.. The only hitch is that each copy of the program must be compiled or otherwise created at the time of purchase. Also, the maker must keep track of each and every set of created special software in case the user emails in that he needs to reinstall. Perhaps even the purchasers name would be encoded and included as part of the intelligence. The number of permissible occurrences of requests for new key codes, say, 5 times, can be controlled by the program maker. If a pirate cracks the code for that single copy of the program, still, it will work only for that copy, and only in the time frame that the internal intelligence says it can be installed.The upshot is that program maker gets money, the purchaser can own it, install on more than one computer in his home, again within a day or so, and new key codes can be obtained in case of needed reinstalls, a reasonable amount of times.