Comments on: The joys of watermarking in place of trad DRM: New EU privacy regs will help https://teleread.org/2018/05/22/the-joys-of-watermarking-in-place-of-trad-drm-even-better-with-new-eu-privacy-safeguards/ Blog on ebooks, publishing, libraries, tech, and related topics Wed, 23 May 2018 04:40:18 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Bill L https://teleread.org/2018/05/22/the-joys-of-watermarking-in-place-of-trad-drm-even-better-with-new-eu-privacy-safeguards/#comment-90034 Wed, 23 May 2018 04:40:18 +0000 http://teleread.org/?p=166621#comment-90034 And then there is Library Genesis where all e-books are without watermarks, supposedly.

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]]> By: Bill Rosenblatt https://teleread.org/2018/05/22/the-joys-of-watermarking-in-place-of-trad-drm-even-better-with-new-eu-privacy-safeguards/#comment-90029 Tue, 22 May 2018 20:03:17 +0000 http://teleread.org/?p=166621#comment-90029 In reply to David Rothman.

As I said, it’s not just the publishers that have to “come around.” It’s the big retailers, too. This is what happened in Germany. In Germany there is a single trade association for both publishers and booksellers. As I understand it, they agreed that a way of keeping Amazon at bay is to offer DRM-free files; so many of the large publishers in Germany (German subsidiaries of multinationals, in some cases) and local German e-book retailers agreed to drop DRM.

And they weren’t the first to come up with this idea, either: the major record labels made a deal with Amazon to sell MP3s DRM-free to boost competition with Apple in the late 2000s. (This was in the works when Steve Jobs put out his supposed clarion call to the music industry to drop DRM.)

And authors are involved too. More than one Big Five trade publishing person has told me that one of the reasons why they stick with DRM is because authors (or their agents) demand it, or at least demand that publishers “do everything possible” to protect copyrights.

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]]> By: David Rothman https://teleread.org/2018/05/22/the-joys-of-watermarking-in-place-of-trad-drm-even-better-with-new-eu-privacy-safeguards/#comment-90021 Tue, 22 May 2018 14:42:21 +0000 http://teleread.org/?p=166621#comment-90021 In reply to Bill Rosenblatt.

Thanks, Bill. Fixed. You’re absolutely right — it’s contract rather than copyright law. I should’ve caught that.

So glad to hear of your enthusiasm. Let’s hope the big publishers will come around. If they do, this will be a win for them as well as readers.

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]]> By: Bill Rosenblatt https://teleread.org/2018/05/22/the-joys-of-watermarking-in-place-of-trad-drm-even-better-with-new-eu-privacy-safeguards/#comment-90019 Tue, 22 May 2018 13:08:02 +0000 http://teleread.org/?p=166621#comment-90019 David,

Thanks very much for the publicity and the kind words.

Just one quibble with your article:

“Under copyright law, the content providers can require DRM.”

Not true. There is nothing in copyright law that enables content providers to require DRM. Instead, they can make it a requirement in license agreements with distributors. That’s a simple matter of contract terms; it has nothing to do with copyright law.

As far as the previous comments on robustness are concerned: I was a skeptic about this a while ago. But then one of the vendors (I won’t say which one, and it’s not necessarily BooXtream) took me “under the hood” and explained their robustness techniques to me. While no watermarking scheme is infinitely robust, I must say I was impressed; robustness has come a long way.

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]]> By: David Rothman https://teleread.org/2018/05/22/the-joys-of-watermarking-in-place-of-trad-drm-even-better-with-new-eu-privacy-safeguards/#comment-90014 Tue, 22 May 2018 11:56:12 +0000 http://teleread.org/?p=166621#comment-90014 @Oliver: Just one of the possibilities: “Insert spaces, metatags, or non-printing characters into the text; for example, the Unicode standard character set defines 66 ‘noncharacters’ that are reserved for private use.”

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]]> By: Olivier https://teleread.org/2018/05/22/the-joys-of-watermarking-in-place-of-trad-drm-even-better-with-new-eu-privacy-safeguards/#comment-90013 Tue, 22 May 2018 11:51:10 +0000 http://teleread.org/?p=166621#comment-90013 Given that epub is a documented format and mostly (completely?) text-based it must be hard to hide watermarks in books without images.

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