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‘Apple’s File Labeling: An Effective Anticopying Tool?’
June 8, 2007 | 10:14 am
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By David Rothman
Privacy issues aren’t the only ones arising from Apple’s social DRMing of some iTunes offering. How about security questions? What if someone changed the name of the owner of a song, for example? Details at Freedom to Tinker, the EFF site, and the Faculty Blog at the U. of Chicago Law School.
E-bookware vendors and e-publishers would do well to pay attention to the issues here. Last I knew, eReader was using owners’ credit card numbers to identify book owners, but was encrypting the data. That, of course, might leave open the issue of what happens when credit card numbers change. Anyone know?
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Comments:
Your books don’t expire if you choose to use a different credit card with eReader books.
If you want to change the credit card number encrypted into a book, however, you have to go to the eReader site, change your credit card in your profile, and then re-download your books with the updated encryption.
DriveThruRPG has used a watermarking system where essentially they embed your name at the bottom of each page of the PDFs they sell. Quite a few still show up on file sharing networks…I assume the name is incorrect or the files were taken without the purchasers knowledge, which I imagine woudl be a bigger issue. If I buy a bunch of iTunes files and they show up on some Torrent, what is Apple really going to do if I say someone else accessed my computer and copied them (other than perhaps cancel my account)?
Jean is almost correct in what is required when you want to change which card is used with your books. She left out two steps, however.
After you change your credit card in your profile, you have to BUY at least one new item off the site, and choose “Reset Unlock Codes” from your profile page before you can re-download your books with the new encryption. Until you buy something with the new card, you get the following message:
This function is unavailable because your current primary credit card has not yet been used to purchase something from eReader.com.
So, until I buy something new from the site, I can’t put the books I already paid for onto my new Palm, because my old unlock code is from a card that I got rid of months ago, and cannot remember the full number.
If it wasn’t clear from this explanation, I’m not impressed with eReader at the moment.