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Right- you can't really determine loss in that fashion. They don't specify what they consider actual damages in this document.
Also, in addition to asking for actual damages/profit (when they're talking about 504 (b)) they're also asking for statutory damages for willful infringement (504(c), or up to $150,000 per infringement).
It doesn't matter how much the court grants in damages. Real damages that can be collected can only go as high as the defendant can actually pay. The courts can award millions in damages, but WotC will be lucky to collect tens of thousands.
__________________ Brain: Come Pinky! We must prepare for tomorrow night.
Pinky: Why? What are we going to do tomorrow night?
Brain: The same thing we do every night....TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!
Couldn't they change the hiding places of the watermarks?
not only that, but we just know that there is a hidden watermark, somewhere in one of the pixels of the PDF. There are a lot of pixels in a PDF... I don't know much... or really anything about cracking DRM but that strikes me as being almost impossible to find and remove.
__________________ Originally Posted by diaglo
Olgar Shiverstone or other new edition DM: so i've gotta wrap up the campaign..
diaglo: we could play OD&D(1974) the only true game. All the other editions are..
other gamer: i could run a campaign set in space with ninja pirates.
other gamers: done. when do we start.
diaglo:
I know at least one of the pirates is not a US citizen and doesn't live in the US. It'll be interesting to see how that effects the court. THe country they're in isn't well known for working along with US customs and copyright laws.
Also, there's something humerously bizarre about all of us gathering around to freely share the court details about the lawsuit issued against people for freely sharing something
__________________ Psionics are too sci-fi, not like the traditional method of spell casting that has existed only in D&D, involves research, laboratory work, and formulas, and was cribbed directly from a series of science fiction novels. I mean, come on, calling forth the power to alter the world from your own center of will? That's not magical in the slightest! Not at all like my wizard's spell "Telepathy!"
Pixels of each page are more than 6 millions. Are PCs robust enough for this? Assuming software exists for the job.
I would assume that a PC could handle that. I mean, your computer can easily handle not only displaying all those pixels, but dynamically scaling and rendering it. And you'd only be searching for differences. Beyond which, the pdf isn't pure image as a gif or jpg is. The large file "contains" individual image files, lessening the load required for comparison. That said, advanced levels of encryption could make it more difficult, as JohnRTroy said.
__________________ All we want to do is eat your brains
We’re not unreasonable; I mean, no one’s gonna eat your eyes
All we want to do is eat your brains
We’re at an impasse here; maybe we should compromise:
If you open up the doors
We’ll all come inside and eat your brains
Pixels of each page are more than 6 millions. Are PCs robust enough for this? Assuming software exists for the job.
Given the software, detecting a single-pixel difference between PDFs could be done in a trivial amount of time. Consider the fact that your computer needs to process all those pixels anyway in order to put them on the screen, after all.
However: Even if this particular system can be circumvented easily (and that may not necessarily be the case), I'm sure there are several possible ways to have a steganographic watermarking system that's quite robust - there's a pretty major field of research dedicated to this very sort of thing, after all.
It doesn't matter how much the court grants in damages. Real damages that can be collected can only go as high as the defendant can actually pay. The courts can award millions in damages, but WotC will be lucky to collect tens of thousands.
There is no jail time possible for civil cases. For jail to be a possibility the "state" (local/state/federal) would have to file a criminal case and the likelyhood of that is as close to zero as to make it meaningless.
__________________ Brain: Come Pinky! We must prepare for tomorrow night.
Pinky: Why? What are we going to do tomorrow night?
Brain: The same thing we do every night....TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!
However: Even if this particular system can be circumvented easily (and that may not necessarily be the case), I'm sure there are several possible ways to have a steganographic watermarking system that's quite robust - there's a pretty major field of research dedicated to this very sort of thing, after all.
Well I guess one could deconstruct the pdf file in image files and reconstruct it with another software so even if one hides to other elements of the pdf file information that would be lost in the process. I have very limited knowledge on these technical things though so I may very well saying only really stupid things here.
Well I guess one could deconstruct the pdf file in image files and reconstruct it with another software so even if one hides to other elements of the pdf file information that would be lost in the process.
Or someone could just buy a hard copy of the book and scan it.
It wouldn't be perfect, but there would be zero chance of traceability. With some of the higher end vision software these days, you could probably even get a decent percentage of the text recognized to be searchable. If someone cared enough, they could manually correct errors and re-proof the whole book.
__________________ We're sorry, we are unable to Cthulhu.boat. Please migraine the cattle prod when the fat guitar makes wallpaper. If the sun is too long, take five ducks and melt them on a post. Thank you for your Volkswagon. -SJ
In one of the pdfs, under "Prayer for Relief", it says WOTC is seeking an injunction against the plaintiff to stop them from: "copying, displaying, distributing, creating derivative works or otherwise usingprotected elements of WOTC copyright.
Thanks for the docs, interesting read. Does section V1, 1 ("Prayer for Relief") have anything to do with the PDF taken down? Is DriveThruRPG/OBS a person "in active concert or participation" with the named defendants?
Also, regarding the pixel wide watermark, I'm not an expert, but I do work in a company that produces print and ebook quality PDFs (honestly, I work in a different department), but running some kind of diff against two or more pdfs isn't as not trivial as some posters make it sound. Remember, PDFs arose out of Postscript languange, these aren't flat image files like jpgs or gifs. Much of the content is encapsulated as vector graphics. Even if the micro water mark is an embedded raster image, you would probably have to parse the underlying Postscript code to identify the stream containing the image data. Removing this data will, in all probability, break the PDF (make it unreadable to readers, corrupt the data.)
edit: to clarify, (or not) it is conceivable that the micro watermark is a one pixel wide, transparent image object that is present in the pdf as a transparency, and is placed over or behind a larger image on the page.
You could harvest the text out the PDF, but would be left with a flat text file, and most likely would have issues with text being lost due to unsupported fonts and crazy formatting to boot.
If we look at the complaints, only three defendants were actually identified as buying the PDFs, the others, including the three John Does, "just" redistributed the watermarked PDFs (obviously, the meat of the complaint).
I think WoTC showed their hand too soon on this one, better if they had waited and identified more individuals involved with the initial purchase and infringing event, so to cast a bigger net. Of course, letting it be known that there is a watermark which 99.99% of all users will not be able to see, find or do anything about should do something to curb (but not suppress, people do have scanners after all) pirating.
WoTC could also look into using something like Microsoft Reader, which is a pretty heavily DRM'd eBook platform, but I doubt that would be widely popular, as the most secure form of Microsoft Reader requires users to have a Microsoft Passport account.
__________________ "Now in the dark world where I dwell ugly things and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things spill out at me constantly, and I can count on nothing."
Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
Last edited by f33b; 9th April 2009 at 06:47 AM..
Reason: clarity
It doesn't matter how much the court grants in damages. Real damages that can be collected can only go as high as the defendant can actually pay. The courts can award millions in damages, but WotC will be lucky to collect tens of thousands.
Very true, but a high damage award could mean a line on the defendant's property and other un-fun things I'm sure he never in a million years thought he was going to face.
My (vague) understanding is that Watermarking technology is (or has to be) much more robust than the simple strategies which are suggested. Aren't there ways to hide the watermark in what appears effectively to be noise added to the data? (And which shows uncorrelated and random differences between any pair of documents?) But there are very bright and hard working folks who make their entire careers on this sort of stuff. I have to figure that there is an amazing amount of sophistication in the technology.
Question, since I didn't read the court documents:
How do they know the accused actually put these items up on P2P themselves?
How can they prove that someone didn't hack their PC and take the files, or a friend using that PC, considering how many folks' WIFI networks aren't secured, PCs that are shared, and how many folk's computers are riddled with malware?
Or that the security system has itself been broken..rather neat way to cover your tracks by putting Santa Claus or some poor schlub as the actual ID, eh?
I know civil cases require less proof than criminal, but the burden of proof etc...ya know?
And the concept that copyright cases can hit ordinary Joe Bloes harder than criminal fines...is outrageous.
And for the record, I support D&D by buying it...rather a bloody lot of it over the years. My concerns are about this copyright and IP madness.
How do they know the accused actually put these items up on P2P themselves?
How can they prove that someone didn't hack their PC and take the files, or a friend using that PC, considering how many folks' WIFI networks aren't secured, PCs that are shared, and how many folk's computers are riddled with malware?
From the documents it is clear that the main argument will point to the fact that the watermarks with their name on it were removed. It shows they were trying to hide their identity. Someone who stole it from them would have little reason to do that.
__________________ David A. Blizzard
"The only constant I am sure of is this accelerating rate of change" - Downside Up by Peter Gabriel
What's the point in sueing a guy from the Phillippines?
Because by suing the ~ don't use profanity thanks - PS~ you make the statement that no matter where you are you WILL be charged, prosecuted and forced to pay up if WotC finds you.
__________________
Last edited by Plane Sailing; 9th April 2009 at 01:38 PM..
Reason: Foreign language epithet removed
Pixels of each page are more than 6 millions. Are PCs robust enough for this? Assuming software exists for the job.
Of course they are - they need to display the pixels after all.
Going over even 6 Million Pixels is not all that hard.
A 10 Megapixel image (like from a good camera, about 3,000 x 3,000 Pixels, larger than any common monitor display can present you) needs around
40 Megabyte of memory in RAM if fully decoded. (Assuming it contains the information for the Red, Green and Blue Channel and an Alpha Channel for transparancy, using 255 distinct values - bytes - for each channel).
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Or someone could just buy a hard copy of the book and scan it.
It wouldn't be perfect, but there would be zero chance of traceability. With some of the higher end vision software these days, you could probably even get a decent percentage of the text recognized to be searchable. If someone cared enough, they could manually correct errors and re-proof the whole book.
Did you know that many printers come with a "watermark", too. Each page is imprinted with it - invisibly to the naked eye, but if you print out something, it could be traced back to the buyer of the printer.
Similar things might be available for scanners, automatically watermarking your scans. (I don't know if that actually is the case, though.) What alone is possible is that, if you create an image with some kind of meta data (like JPEG, the most common file type I suppose), it might just contain the information in your meta data. Of course, removing that is relative easy.
There are probably always ways around it. But scanning an book and checking there are no hidden information in it relating to you is a lot more effort than just uploading some random PDF you just downloaded from a publishing website. It's also more work than removing watermarks from an existing PDFs, since the latter is just a little crunch time for your processor, not requiring you to scan in 100+ pages book.
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Secret Member of <Think we would just hide our secret with a spoiler tag, eh?>
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