BooXtream EPub Watermark Remover

Playing Devil's advocate, these watermarking increase the probability that innocent people will be convicted. Under the law, copyright infringement is not a strict liability tort, ie., one must be at least unreasonably negligent in allowing the work to be copied. But with this mechanism, if an ePub containing a watermark appears on a file sharing network, the buyer is always assumed to be the culprit.

As an example, imagine the user kept 24 books in a personal Dropbox account for easy reading across devices, and someone stole the account's credentials and released the books. The user is now on the hook for $200k in statutory damages despite being himself the victim of a crime instead of the perpetrator.

Some reasons why watermarks could be objectionable are covered in the accompanying Torrentfreak article (already linked in other comments here):

"'Books should be used as tools for disseminating knowledge and information. What ‘social DRM’ watermarking systems do instead is turn books into tools of surveillance and oppression by monitoring who shares what knowledge, where,' IBI explain.

"'We don’t like this, and because the publisher Verso has refused to remove the watermarks themselves, we decided to do it for them, and to show everyone how these systems work.'

"But there are bigger issues at stake. While people in the West take the freedom to read books of their choosing for granted, not everyone has that luxury.

"'Imagine if a watermarked ebook contains someone's name (as many do). Suppose that someone is reading that watermarked ebook under a regime that bans the particular kind of material covered in that book,' IBI add.

"'If the operatives of the regime see the watermark, they would then be able to arrest and perhaps even execute the purchaser of the ebook if they too are living under the same regime.'

"But matters of life and death aside, IBI say they believe that people should not only be able to read whatever they want, they should also be able to share that knowledge with others."

I agree with you. Watermarking hurts only pirates. Who would trust a watermarking remover ?

This is much newer, but I think it will eventually be included.

This tool is an implementation of https://pastebin.com/raw/E1xgCUmb

> Because that's a crime under the DMCA.

It's a crime in the U.S., it's not a crime in my country. But this guy has listed American University's email address, so I would definitely remove this software if I were him.

In fact, if I were him, I would find someone not from the U.S. to host the repository, make it private, give him the read/write privileges and then occasionally push the changes to a new public repo (so that the .git folder is different and one could not track the changes as they happen).

But that's just me...

I don't believe so, the DMCA prevents circumventing access controls not watermarks.

I am not a lawyer though!

> submissions here that are cracks, keygens, etc., and they always get flagged and killed

Those are almost always spammy. If there's something intellectually interesting about the post, that would be different. (Not saying that's the case here.)

This is a filter of sorts, not a cracker. Think of it like a reverse Instagram filter to restore the original photo. Whether that's within a certain jurisdictions disallowed things to do publicly I don't know.

It should be noted that BooXtream themselves call this watermarking 'social DRM'.