Stop Piracy, Internet Sminar

[jmucchiello]

Dana_Jorgensen: there might be cost issue, pit-trap issue (hack directly on the website, fraudulent use of credit card, and the funniest changing the id to a random id), and legal issue (I'm pretty sure that it would be illegal all over Europe).

Dana is referring to watermarking. It is a digital process that can be placed on both digital and printed products. The watermark is invisible to the naked eye and will survive through a scan / print / scan cycle when properly placed. Unfortunately, the cost is outrageous for that amount of security. And for print products it is useless since you have to print each book separately in order to give them different watermarks. And unless you only sell the books from your private web page (taking down names and addresses), reading the watermark will not tell you where the book was bought. It MIGHT tell you who the distributer was, if you have more than one, but beyond that it does not help with prosecution.

In the digital realm, for a few less bucks you could implant watermarks that cannot be removed easily. And since all sales are traceable on the internet, you would know who bought the book now being pirated.

Unfortunately, this will barely slow down piracy. The flaw with trying to stop piracy in the digital realm is that the object cost to protect your PDF is probably higher than the price at which you are selling it. Adding those costs in to the price just makes you customers mad. ($15 for 50 page PDF?!?)

It is a fact of digital life that some people are going to distribute unlicensed copies of your book to people who would never buy it in the first place.

When Napster was at its peak, sales of music were also at their all-time peak. Honest people use illegal copies to find stuff they are going to buy anyway. People who "sample" your product through illicit services who do not pay for it later were never going to buy your product in the first place. Honest people who use your product will go and buy their own copy. Is there a shady group in between who might have bought your product but won't? Yes. So what? Next time advertise to them before it hits the pirate networks and hopefully they will buy before they try.

Anyway, I can hear the jackboots of the moderators coming this way to put a stop to this hot topic before it becomes political.

Fact is, some people will always find ways to not pay for items. It's a fact of doing business. Do you also want to help the print publishers out with shoplifting? It also affects their sales.

 

[jmucchiello]

Dana_Jorgensen: there might be cost issue, pit-trap issue (hack directly on the website, fraudulent use of credit card, and the funniest changing the id to a random id), and legal issue (I'm pretty sure that it would be illegal all over Europe).

Watermarks are not ids. They are hidden data inside the cracks of the data format. Most data formats have unused bits. Watermarking tacks onto these bits in ways that you cannot detect unless you know how the watermark is coded.

There is definitely a cost. Watermarking software is far from cheap.

 

[Cergorach]

Yes, it is a tagging method, but it is one that isn't easy to uncover. It doesn't show up in any of the various document properties of PDFs. And printing/rescanning isn't much of an option, either, due to the time and drive space it consumes

But with the way that these thieves operate, they don't bother looking for such things. They just download the stuff from RPGnow, and dump it into the folder they have exposed to their IRC fserve, FTP server, DC hub, Kazaa share folder, etc. Those who check are few and far between. And while it won't stop the piracy once the item is out there, it will help identify the individuals responsible for it and they can be specifically targeted for civil and criminal charges, as well as being able to cut them off from their source - the stores they buy the stuff from.

And the fact that it does nothing to stop the piracy of printed material isn't much of a reason to not try something that can stop the piracy of PDFs.

Tagging a file in the code is useless, copying the content of a pdf to a new pdf should remove this, there's also a program that copies bookmarks, so no information is lost.
(has been tested)

Tagging the content through the use for example of in invisible image or text is a lot harder to find, but as someone said dumping the images and OCRing from there is also a possibility. No problems with drive space because The digitally extracted images are directly OCRed and again made into text. For text tagging, a far quicker method would be to just save the text as .txt and look for any text that shouldn't be there, search document for text andd remove. For image tagging it's a bit more work, you just dump all the image files from the pdf and add only the images that you can see into the pdf (so no invisible images remain).
(has been tested)

Tagging without informing the customer is pretty illegal in europe and would constitute a breach of privacy. This could mean the end of just about any pdf making company or the company that distributes the pdfs, legal aid ain't cheap you know. It would be very simple to counter any charge, with "i've been hacked", unless you can proof the person wilingly shared the document.

Also, this will only work once, the next release you'll find on the internet will be tagged by trusted releasers that have actually removed any tagging. Pirates also have this little code among themselves, anyone who tries to screw them usually gets a lot of attention on the internet resulting in a lot of bad publicity and easily to get product files. That kind of attention is not something anyone in the current pdf RPG market can handle.

The reason not to do anything about it is:
1.) Cost. If it doesn't increase revenue in a big way, no one is interested in spending a lot amount on anti piracy.
2.) Bad publicity. Just look at how much hate RIAA and affiliates generate. If people don't like you, they are less inclined to buy your product, they might still like your product, but are just as easily satisfied with a pirated copy.
3.) Power trips are bad for the personality. You, can't move mountains, can't stop the dying, can't stop corruption, and you can't stop piracy. Any attempt to stop this is denying reality, which might lead to a straight jacket. People need to deal with reality and learn of a way to life with it and not let it affect you.

My question would be:
If you had the 'perfect' anti piracy system and it would work, how many extra paying customers would you have?
My estimate would be:
Not many
Reason:
Not every pirated product is a lost sale.

 

[Dana_Jorgensen]

This is amusing. Don't confuse RPG pirates with warez pirates. The RPG pirates are such idiots that they accredit themselves for scanning and/or OCR work done on printed products they've converted to PDF.

They do not put any effort into protecting themselves. They seem to think that simply by swapping files through an IRC server in Hungary, they are immune from any legal action.

They do not put any effort whatsoever in checking for any security measures installed in a document. And considering the quality of most of their "work", I doubt any of them would know what to do to begin with. The high point in their "leet skillz" at this point is the capacity to downsample covers to shave a couple megs off a scan-based PDF someone else did.

I've been making observations of these people for months now. They exhibit a "script kiddie" level of sophistication.

Anyway, what I have in mind is tagging that can be done with only a few hours of PHP or ASP programming, with little or no extra expense, with a half dozen different ways of implementing it.

Even if they did develop means of countering such security measures, they could still easily be stung, with several months of tracking done to identify a large number of individuals engaged in the first stages of the piracy. But even then, a sting might not be necessary. If someone can be identified as a source of pirated files, there's no reason why an online store can't cut them off with no reason given for the action. Businesses have the right to refuse to do business with people for any reason. It's one of the few legal forms of discrimination left for bigots here in the United States. This would reduce the rate of piracy while protecting the security measures for as long as possible by preventing exposure of the fact that such measures are used.

As for tagging being illegal in Europe, I don't particularly care. It isn't like European privacy laws apply here in the United States. The only PDF-making companies that would be harmed by this would be those based in Europe.

On a side note, I'm really getting annoyed with the way the cookies on these boards expire in the two freaking minutes it takes to write this reply...

 

[Cergorach]

This is amusing. Don't confuse RPG pirates with warez pirates. The RPG pirates are such idiots that they accredit themselves for scanning and/or OCR work done on printed products they've converted to PDF.

They do not put any effort into protecting themselves. They seem to think that simply by swapping files through an IRC server in Hungary, they are immune from any legal action.

They do not put any effort whatsoever in checking for any security measures installed in a document. And considering the quality of most of their "work", I doubt any of them would know what to do to begin with. The high point in their "leet skillz" at this point is the capacity to downsample covers to shave a couple megs off a scan-based PDF someone else did.

I've been making observations of these people for months now. They exhibit a "script kiddie" level of sophistication.

Anyway, what I have in mind is tagging that can be done with only a few hours of PHP or ASP programming, with little or no extra expense, with a half dozen different ways of implementing it.

Even if they did develop means of countering such security measures, they could still easily be stung, with several months of tracking done to identify a large number of individuals engaged in the first stages of the piracy. But even then, a sting might not be necessary. If someone can be identified as a source of pirated files, there's no reason why an online store can't cut them off with no reason given for the action. Businesses have the right to refuse to do business with people for any reason. It's one of the few legal forms of discrimination left for bigots here in the United States. This would reduce the rate of piracy while protecting the security measures for as long as possible by preventing exposure of the fact that such measures are used.

As for tagging being illegal in Europe, I don't particularly care. It isn't like European privacy laws apply here in the United States. The only PDF-making companies that would be harmed by this would be those based in Europe.

On a side note, I'm really getting annoyed with the way the cookies on these boards expire in the two freaking minutes it takes to write this reply...

Ah, you talk of the rabble, these people are as much the elite as kazaa is. The crediting of scanned work isn't much different then the warez community release groups. It had the same troubles at the start of that system as the rpg rable has now, claiming credit for anothers work (which is pretty ridiculus in itself), there have been 'scan wars' about this (can you say insane in the membrane?). Most of the 'elite' are in the background, they don't want to get stuck in the middle, these are the people who get the quality work out there, and because it's quality work the release speed isn't very high (this is mostly scanned and then OCRed material). The reason they don't handle RPG pdfs is because they don't need to. If watermarking or tagging is added, they do need to handle such files and they will. Just look at the beginning of RPG pdfs, some people wanted to secure their pdfs, some of the 'elite' removed these security measures, now the tools for removing PDF security are so easy to use and so wide spread that no 'elite' bothers anymore.

*chuckles* Banning paying customers from spending cash on your products? This is rich! A pdf publisher would be sooooooo stupid to do this. One would loose more customers then one would gain. You would cull the herd, remove the stupid ones and give the smartones free reign. Opening a new paypal account under a different name isn't very difficult, banning an IP address is also easily circumvented for such small files.

 

[Dana_Jorgensen]

Well, Cergorach, you've made it quite obvious that you don't even follow the rpg piracy scene.

I know these people. Though I have been tracking piracy of my own products for several months, I have been watching the scene for over two years. Hell, I can remember the hooplah over the opening of Enerla.net and its rpg-warez channel. Many of them think I happen to be their friend. software warez and rpg warez won't be mixing up any time in the near future, no matter how much you'd like to think otherwise. There is no "elite force" hiding behind these people. They are too proud of their own efforts to even consider relying on the help of any sort of specialists even if they had access to them. Good Lord, man, you call yourself a gamer and don't even grasp this flaw inherent to the personalities of almost all gamers?

And when it boils right down to it, even if you think it is funny, kicking out a shoplifter is always better for business than allowing them to continue stealing. As I said, when you have proof they are the suppliers of files being pirated, you cut them off. I didn't say randomly choose targets for this until the piracy stops.

 

[Cergorach]

Well, Cergorach, you've made it quite obvious that you don't even follow the rpg piracy scene.

I know these people. Though I have been tracking piracy of my own products for several months, I have been watching the scene for over two years. Hell, I can remember the hooplah over the opening of Enerla.net and its rpg-warez channel. Many of them think I happen to be their friend. software warez and rpg warez won't be mixing up any time in the near future, no matter how much you'd like to think otherwise. There is no "elite force" hiding behind these people. They are too proud of their own efforts to even consider relying on the help of any sort of specialists even if they had access to them. Good Lord, man, you call yourself a gamer and don't even grasp this flaw inherent to the personalities of almost all gamers?

And when it boils right down to it, even if you think it is funny, kicking out a shoplifter is always better for business than allowing them to continue stealing. As I said, when you have proof they are the suppliers of files being pirated, you cut them off. I didn't say randomly choose targets for this until the piracy stops.

*drops to his knees*
All hail the messiah! He is more than one person, sees the future and past as one, he knows all, is all, and be all! All hail the messiah!

*chuckles*

I am a rpg gamer, for about... 16 years, i do not call myself "gamer", i call myself "Cergorach" (on the internet). I have almost always played with friends, so my perception of gamers is a bit different than yours. But i can see your point (because you exhibit it so profoundly)...

Dana, let's agree to disagree, you keep thinking of me as a wannabee, and i will keep myself bussy with informing users how to circumvent security that hinders the usage of a product or compromises the users privacy...

 

[jgbrowning]

Spending the money and effort required to combat PDF piracy is currently not worth it for us.

joe b.

 

[Crothian]

I also think that most of these "pirates" would not be buying the products if they can not get it for free. If they can get it for free great, if not they can live without.

 

[Cergorach]

I also think that most of these "pirates" would not be buying the products if they can not get it for free. If they can get it for free great, if not they can live without.

Wise words!

btw. are you an AI? i can't believe the number of posts you've made! Do you know the meaning of sleep? Have you already found the meaning of life? ;-)

Spending the money and effort required to combat PDF piracy is currently not worth it for us.

Why would you want to spend anything on anti-piracy when the most important products you have are already 99,99% OGC? I wish all the game companies where as nice as this!