Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

I lolled at "impossible to break the DRM." Of course practically, they could make it very difficult, I'm not denying that. However, it's kind of funny to have DRM on something that can be copied with screenshots. If we ever get to the hilariously desperate level of HDCP for ebooks, you could still use a camera pointed at a screen and decent OCR to get something reasonable.

It's even dumber of course, because many people, when faced with the issue that they can no longer get a DRM free copy of something they bought, have a perfectly reasonable alternative that is free and provides DRM free copies of nearly anything. I guess it must be really important to stomp out the casual copying, but I find it hard to believe that people who are just casually copying would bother to do what was necessary already. Seems to me like this is probably something that mostly power users would've done.

View on HN

Taking screenshots and using OCR isn't breaking the DRM. They didn't say "impossible to pirate".

I didn't say that was breaking the DRM. I said I think it's silly to have DRM on something that's so easy to copy regardless. That's still true alongside "no DRM is impossible to break"

OCRing individual screenshots is not "easy to copy."

Most people who pirate (books, software, music, whatever) won't bother to go to such extreme lengths. Stuff like this obviously doesn't make piracy impossible, but it does substantially reduce it.

For a long time OCR of books/pdfs/ebooks was the standard in the ebook piracy scene. Pirated ebooks had version numbers for OCR/quality corrections.

The same distribution channels are even still running since before things like Amazon's mobi format (and Calibre) were created.

I don't think this DRM change will substantially reduce piracy. Actions like the takedown of Z-Library's domains probably had a much greater effect.

One person automating downloading of Amazon Unlimited's new releases and OCRing them would be way easier than the old dead tree OCR setups.

So it will make stripping the DRM for personal use (and, I suppose, sharing with friends) infeasible, while doing little to prevent it from showing up at piracy sites.

Which will be enough to discourage a lot of pirates. Certainly most of the potential pirates who could conceivably be converted to buyers.

Gabe Newell had the right idea when he said that you don't have to make piracy impossible, you just have to make purchasing easier than pirating. The kind of people who will jump through endless hoops, tolerate shoddy rips, etc. just to get something for free were never going to be your customers anyway.

It's all great to quote Gabe Newell but you are completely misunderstanding his point. The point is that the steam platform makes it so easy to buy and play games that pirating them is comparatively risky (chance of malware, lack of updates) and not worth it, not that he has made games difficult enough to pirate that his platform seems favorable. Games on steam have no default DRM like ebooks on the amazon store, for the kinds of games I play, most of them can be copied from steam and played without the interference of DRM. For a lot of the ones which do have some kind of DRM or steam reliance, it is actually trivial to use a fake steam library to bypass this form of "DRM". All in all, the amount of actual DRM on steam is limited only to AAA titles.

I pirate e-books not because I can't afford to buy them, but because I can't find a DRM free copy so I just buy the hard copy and pirate a digital version. The reality is, if there were more e-book stores which were like steam, I would probably use them, because hopefully I would have access to the content I bought to display it on any device I want and archive it for the future.

That would make me more likely to pirate it. Currently I've been able to buy the books and strip the DRM

> Which will be enough to discourage a lot of pirates.

Sounds more like it would turn people who would remove the DRM of the stuff they bought into people who visit pirate sites.

I mean, you can archieve that with a smartphone and open source OCR software. If you just care about reading and not searching, you can even leave out the OCR step and just store the photos.

That sounds pretty easy to me.

Compared to cracking DRM schemes, which is what people were doing anyways, it is relatively simple...

Yes, they are weasels to publishers as much as they are to customers.

That's the unexplainable part of DRM.

Every kind of non-interactive DRM media is trivial to break. What's the point of not allowing me to read a book I bought in any device when I will always be able to pirate it? Is there a point other than making software worse to show content creators that something be being done to combat piracy?

> What's the point of not allowing me to read a book I bought in any device when I will always be able to pirate it?

You will be able to pirate it. Your mom, dad, their friends etc. probably not.

The pirated copies usually come from people who defeated DRM and made it available to the public. If DRM is harder to break, it means less availability via alternate means.

True, but they'll take the path of less resistance. If breaking the DRM is not strictly necessary for copying, then as soon as breaking the DRM becomes more difficult than automating screenshots and OCR, I'd expect that to start happening.

The truth is though, I personally doubt ebook DRM is terribly impressive. Maybe I'm just wrong, but it seems like the reality is that people who break the DRM just don't bother publishing their tools anymore because the cat and mouse game isn't worth the trouble.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com