[qq66]

The public link is probably coded to each subscriber, so they would be able to identify the culprit and disable all the links from that subscriber.

[selmnoo]

Hah, come on. :) That's not a very high barrier. A 'pirate' simply has to get a throwaway account (or steal one, if he's truly bad) and he doesn't even have to worry about that.

I expect all Nature articles made "free" today to be available on TPB in one month. I'll put .1 BTC on it. :)

[eru]

What odds?

[morninj]

As soon as a link is shared, each person who learns the URL is potentially a "culprit."

[jpatokal]

Not if the URL encodes the originator of the link, and all links tied to that user stop working when Nature flips a switch.

But regardless of what DRM scheme they choose, it's doomed to fail, all it takes is one person to crack the scheme and liberate the underlying documents. Alternatively, since 100 anointed blogs and media outlets will apparently have the right to download raw PDFs, all it takes is for one of their accounts to get hacked.

[eru]

Don't you have that problem already?