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Re: AoE X-Chapters?

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On 01/03/2017 09:11, Clifford Heath wrote:
> On 28/02/17 23:08, Chris Jones wrote:
>> On 28/02/2017 12:57, Clifford Heath wrote:
>>> On 28/02/17 12:11, Winfield Hill wrote:
>>>> Michael Elwood wrote...
>>>>>
>>>>> Since Win brought this up.... Is there any projections
>>>>> on publication date for the X Chapters?
>>>>
>>>>  We've still got 20-25% to finish.  Masses of really
>>>>  good stuff already done, needs to get out there.
>>>>
>>>>  We're talking about a live online version that
>>>>  could be continuously updated as we finish the
>>>>  last portions, and add new stuff to the rest.
>>>>  This scheme would allow earlier publication, but
>>>>  brings into question issues about a printed book.
>>>
>>> I hear you. Online e-books should be digitally watermarked with
>>> the name of the purchaser visible in each copy, to discourage
>>> "sharing" and to assist in copyright prosecutions.
>>>
>>> The books available from https://pragprog.com are digitally
>>> generated with watermarking at the point of purchase. This seems
>>> like a no-brainer, yet very few e-book publishers have done it.
>>
>> Maybe because the people who distribute pirate copies commercially can
>> easily enough remove the watermark, and the people who don't sell the
>> pirate copies commercially are either undeterred by the watermark
>> (because they trust their friends) or they are not pirating enough books
>> to be costing significant sales and/or not rich enough to be worth
>> taking to court.
>>
>> Making the watermark really hard to remove probably involves significnt
>> investment and/or annoys the readers, perhaps to the extent of
>> detracting from the content, rendering the book not worth pirating.
>
> Thank-you for your uninformed opinion; we're all dumber for it.
> You might like to Google "steganography".

I am aware of steganography.

>
> Speaking as someone who has written a PDF parser, and spent a decade
> building banking-grade cryptographic products... the "easy" methods
> for watermarking are easy to remove, but it's actually not hard to
> put either visible or invisible watermarks into a PDF so that they're
> really hard to remove.

I think that visible watermarks may be difficult to remove if they are 
overlapping the content that the purchaser paid to see (but may be 
either annoying to paying customers, or otherwise non-trivial to 
generate for arbitrary content).

Truly invisible watermarks should be very easily removed by rendering 
the page to a bitmap, quantizing the pixel colours (usually black and 
white would do), and then optionally re-encoding that to a PDF if you 
still want it in pdf file format. I would not call that "really hard". 
If you want the text to be searchable then there is the extra step of 
running it through OCR, which may be difficult to do well, but I doubt 
many pirates would be that bothered by the accuracy of the OCR text. 
Some documents are so poorly structured (e.g. text stored as bitmap 
images in the original document, or parts of words in separare strings 
where someone was trying to do custom character spacing) that the 
rendering+OCR process might sometimes improve the usability!

>
> I won't go into all the details, but there are at least a thousand
> ways to encode data into PDF without changing the rendered result.

True. Of course these are all useless if the pirate uses only the 
rendered (bitmap) result.

> If random variations are included in many places, then simple
> differencing cannot find where the watermark is stored. And if the
> watermark is extended across all these locations using heavily
> redundant FEC, then the watermark is effectively impossible to
> remove.
Yes, this could work, but is not really trivial to implement. If the 
document is valuable enough to warrant this kind of work (e.g. drafts of 
a free trade agreement during the phase after the pharma companies and 
MPAA finished writing it, but before it has been signed and shown to the 
citizens whose rights it is about to delete...), then the person 
pirating/leaking it might also go to some trouble. For example, if the 
pirate has multiple copies of the document with different watermarks and 
randomly uses pixels from different copies for different parts of each 
page, the FEC might need to be quite good to withstand that.

Personally I have never seen any watermarking that affects the pixel 
colours in the rendered result, other than very obvious text on the edge 
of each page.

>
> Has this actually been done? I'm not sure... but I'm sure it can be.
> Yes, it's harder than appending an object to the PDF dictionary or
> inserting text into the MSWord original, but not much harder.
>
>> IMO watermarking / DRM stuff is mostly just annoying for the paying
>> customers. I for one refuse to buy any DRMed files, but I spend a lot on
>> books.
>
> How is watermarking annoying?
Not often, but I have had downloads take a long time to start, and I 
think this was due to the machine that does the watermarking being not 
up to the load.

It could also be annoying if your coworker (with whom you are legally 
permitted to share a document) then gives it to someone else. In other 
words, the person whose name is on the watermark is not necessarily the 
one who did any copyright infringement. To avoid this, you could make 
your coworkers each download their own copy, rather than using shared 
drives or dropbox etc. (or even shared paper copies) for sharing 
documents for which you have a company-wide licence, but that would be 
annoying. Some watermarks are vague enough that the individual user 
within the company cannot be identified, however I suspect that this 
would destroy most of their deterrent effectiveness.

> Besides, the main benefit of watermarking
> isn't that it enables prosecution, but that it discourages sharing
> in the first place. The buyer doesn't need to see the watermark on
> every other page, they just need to know that their purchase can be
> traced.
>
> I'm not talking about enforced DRM. I personally agree with you here.
Ok, I should not have conflated DRM with watermarking.

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OT: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 Winfield Hill <hill@rowland.harvard.edu> - 2017-02-03 11:35 -0800
  Re: OT: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 boB <boB@theresnoplacelikehome.com> - 2017-02-03 14:17 -0800
  Re: OT: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 bitrex <bitrex@de.lete.earthlink.net> - 2017-02-03 18:35 -0500
    Re: OT: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 Winfield Hill <hill@rowland.harvard.edu> - 2017-02-03 17:20 -0800
  Re: OT: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 Pimpom <Pimpom@invalid.com> - 2017-02-04 15:38 +0530
    Re: OT: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 Winfield Hill <hill@rowland.harvard.edu> - 2017-02-04 04:39 -0800
  Re: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 "Tom Del Rosso" <fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> - 2017-02-04 10:02 -0500
    Re: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 Frnak McKenney <frnak@far.from.the.madding.crowd.com> - 2017-02-18 22:22 -0600
      Re: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 John Larkin <jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> - 2017-02-18 20:25 -0800
    Re: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 Joerg <news@analogconsultants.com> - 2017-02-28 16:19 -0800
      Re: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 "Tom Del Rosso" <fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> - 2017-03-01 05:53 -0500
        Re: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 Joerg <news@analogconsultants.com> - 2017-03-01 07:16 -0800
  Re: OT: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 amdx <nojunk@knology.net> - 2017-02-25 18:59 -0600
  AoE X-Chapters? Michael Elwood <mkelwoodut@gmail.com> - 2017-02-27 15:39 -0800
    Re: AoE X-Chapters? Winfield Hill <hill@rowland.harvard.edu> - 2017-02-27 17:11 -0800
      Re: AoE X-Chapters? Tom Gardner <spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> - 2017-02-28 01:20 +0000
        Re: AoE X-Chapters? Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> - 2017-02-28 10:10 -0500
      Re: AoE X-Chapters? Clifford Heath <no.spam@please.net> - 2017-02-28 12:57 +1100
        Re: AoE X-Chapters? Winfield Hill <hill@rowland.harvard.edu> - 2017-02-28 03:10 -0800
        Re: AoE X-Chapters? Tom Gardner <spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> - 2017-02-28 11:39 +0000
        Re: AoE X-Chapters? Chris Jones <lugnut808@spam.yahoo.com> - 2017-02-28 23:08 +1100
          Re: AoE X-Chapters? Clifford Heath <no.spam@please.net> - 2017-03-01 09:11 +1100
            Re: AoE X-Chapters? Chris Jones <lugnut808@spam.yahoo.com> - 2017-03-02 01:24 +1100
              Re: AoE X-Chapters? Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> - 2017-03-01 10:50 -0500
                Re: AoE X-Chapters? Tom Gardner <spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> - 2017-03-01 16:34 +0000
                Re: AoE X-Chapters? John Larkin <jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> - 2017-03-01 08:58 -0800
                Re: AoE X-Chapters? Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> - 2017-03-01 12:43 -0500
        Re: AoE X-Chapters? Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> - 2017-02-28 10:11 -0500
        Re: AoE X-Chapters? Neon John <no@never.com> - 2017-02-28 12:11 -0500
        Re: AoE X-Chapters? Spehro Pefhany <speffSNIP@interlogDOTyou.knowwhat> - 2017-02-28 18:36 -0500
          Re: AoE X-Chapters? Clifford Heath <no.spam@please.net> - 2017-03-01 12:40 +1100
          Re: AoE X-Chapters? George Herold <gherold@teachspin.com> - 2017-02-28 17:44 -0800
            Re: AoE X-Chapters? Winfield Hill <hill@rowland.harvard.edu> - 2017-02-28 18:22 -0800
              Re: AoE X-Chapters? pcdhobbs@gmail.com - 2017-02-28 18:28 -0800
                Re: AoE X-Chapters? Winfield Hill <hill@rowland.harvard.edu> - 2017-02-28 19:10 -0800
                Re: AoE X-Chapters? pcdhobbs@gmail.com - 2017-03-01 06:08 -0800
              Re: AoE X-Chapters? pcdhobbs@gmail.com - 2017-02-28 18:28 -0800
      Re: AoE X-Chapters? George Herold <gherold@teachspin.com> - 2017-02-27 18:25 -0800
        Re: AoE X-Chapters? George Herold <gherold@teachspin.com> - 2017-02-27 18:28 -0800
      Re: AoE X-Chapters? Neon John <no@never.com> - 2017-02-28 12:06 -0500
  Re: OT: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 gyansorova@gmail.com - 2017-03-05 12:37 -0800
    Re: OT: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 Winfield Hill <hill@rowland.harvard.edu> - 2017-03-05 12:51 -0800
    Re: OT: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 John Larkin <jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> - 2017-03-05 13:47 -0800
      Re: OT: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 George Herold <gherold@teachspin.com> - 2017-03-05 18:23 -0800
        Re: OT: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 John Larkin <jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> - 2017-03-05 18:37 -0800
          Re: OT: Art of Electronics, 3rd ed, for $59.96 pcdhobbs@gmail.com - 2017-03-06 05:17 -0800

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