[n9]

It is basically the same with the books. The IA's book hosting system has DRM, yes, but it is Adobe's ADE which has been well and truly cracked. If you have a bit of patience and tech knowledge you can pull a full PDF of any book on IA in about 20 second's time. They could do a better job restricting access and I figure they wouldn't be in this much trouble.

[timschmidt]

The DMCA makes no distinction between 'weak' and 'strong' DRM. Bypassing any form of digital protection violates the act, and media companies have fought to defend their use of materially insufficient DRM such as DVD-CSS.

[n9]

This is not simply a legal issue. As an author of books myself I have very little problem with libraries and online lending and I feel there is mutual benefit. I do not feel the same way about the way that IA is hosting commercial titles, which hews very close to ZLibrary, which I do not think is beneficial for all of us in the long term as it disincentivizes the production of books even if it makes things available to more people in the near term. We might disagree about that but my belief is pretty set.

Regarding legality, the media company battle re: DVD-CSS is quite different in quite a number of ways such that it doesn't simply apply here. That said, I'm not making a legal argument -- I am advocating for a system that makes sense to authors (whom we rely on to write the things that we value) and the greater good.

[timschmidt]

I suppose you could lobby Adobe to build stronger DRM. People will just break it again. There is no apparent technical solution to perfectly prevent users who can read the content from copying the content. Legal solutions are what you get.

[n9]

The technical solution in this case is to not allow the ADE files to be downloaded -- they are not even available in the IA GUI -- there is a well-known backdoor that to my eye isn't needed to support any of the available features on the site.

Just to rephrase for clarity: the way that pretty much every college student that I know downloads many, many books from the archive is via an undocumented route on the website that isn't needed for the site's published borrowing functionality to work.

If you look here: https://archive.org/details/lexicographyoedp0000unse you will see that downloading is not supported.

Yet if click "Borrow" and then you hit this URL while logged in: https://archive.org/services/loans/loan/?action=media_url&id...

You will download a ADE stub file that is trivially deDRM'd.

IA's "solution" to a previous issue with publishers was to remove this functionality from their site. They pulled the links in the UI but not the functionality... I don't think they operate in good faith.

But... far be it from me to expect any dialogue where to be anything but creator hostile. To my mind that is very much short term thinking. We need to make sure creators are paid for their work because we want them to keep creating -- and for others to also create. Just because things are legal doesn/t make them right and/or for the greater good.

[timschmidt]

Right-clicking on that page and selecting "inspect" (or running the web session through a transparent proxy and inspecting the traffic in transit) seems to allow me to pull out individual pages of the book through the API calls used by the web reader. If they DRM'd the individual images it wouldn't be much more challenging. Every person will draw the line in a different place, and that is why the legal system exists.

Again, if you're allowing someone to view something, there is always a way to copy it. DRM and the legal frameworks around it (which we both seem to agree that IA has applied here) are the best available deterrent to copying.

The only way to be sure something will never be copied against your will is to never distribute it to anyone.

[n9]

the logical conclusion here is that generation of reproducible content for profit or even for sustenance is innately impossible. this is neither true not desirable. enjoy pedantism on the internet!