Is "soft DRM" a viable option?

Question

For "soft DRM" I mean a sort of watermark (for example, a section stating "This book has been bought by Jane Doe from ACME Inc") which does not protect the book from being copied but states who is the buyer.

Yes, I know that deleting the watermark is a piece of cake: I am not concerned with this. I am just wondering if this makes sense or not, and I have mixed feelings, but I can't tell whether it is the fact that with a physical book this does not happen or not. What are pros and cons, in your opinion?

Answer 1

I don't know if there are studies into soft DRM, but there are studies on difference in behaviour between people that are anonymous and people that are not. The non-anonymous generally being more "honest".

Removing soft DRM would rely on the non-anonymous person to do so, before handing the ebook on to someone else. Not doing so would have her/him run the risk of the passed on ebook being made even more public with name identification attached. I can only assume that for some of the potential passers-on, this is a deterrent.

You also would have to trust the software that removes the watermarking. Removing metadata is not enough, since the watermarking could be added via steganographic approach. Some formats such as PDF, have a plethora of possibilities to hide information. And you would have to remove images from an EPUB file, or severely change them, as there are watermarks for images that survive some of the re-renderings of the images. And your name could be watermarked in any or all of the images included in a book.

Answer 2

For me, Soft DRM is a viable option that helps the book provider to identify who they provided the book for/to. I'm not aware of any formal analysis, or reports, of how Soft DRM fares in terms of things like unauthorized copying. I've found 'soft copies' of books online that were watermarked for someone else so unauthorized copies/distribution exists. However cracked (most likely unathorized) copies of 'hard' DRM books are also available on the internet.

In terms of my own purchasing practices, in 2013 I personally bought at least 50 ebooks online. These were mainly technical books. I bought the vast majority from 3 publishers: O'Reilly, Pragmatic Programmers, and Packt Publishing. They are all DRM Free. https://www.packtpub.com/about http://shop.oreilly.com/category/ebooks.do http://pragprog.com/frequently-asked-questions/ebooks (they say most, not all books are DRM free. The ones I've bought from them, at least 10 titles, all are).

I have bought various books that have soft DRM e.g. from Apress http://www.apress.com/customer-support/ and Commonsware https://wares.commonsware.com/

And I've bought very few books with active DRM, with one exception - ebooks bought for Kindles. I explain some of my reasons later on in this reply.

Here's my original answer, which includes some of my opinions (as requested by the question)

I am happy to buy ebooks with watermarks such as 'prepared for Julian Harty' as I'm able to easily copy the file onto the various computers and devices I use from time to time over the years. (I have ebooks first obtained over a decade ago, my computers from those days tend to have died.)

Having a watermark is a low-barrier for people determined to share / copy material regardless of copyright, however for me it's part of an honour-based system where I've legitimately obtained material where I shouldn't share it.

I tend not to buy hard-DRM'd ebooks; the one exception being books from Amazon's Kindle store. The Kindle ecosystem is compelling and one I've gotten used to. One key benefit is global 3G access to content at no extra charge from my 3G Kindles. I'm willing to tolerate DRM on the Kindles, and haven't had problems reading my Kindle content on lots of devices over the years I've been using them.

So for any publishers who read this answer, please realize you're less likely for me to buy from you. I've not bought tens of technical books when I discovered the site uses DRM. Instead I'll find similar books from stores that don't use hard DRM. I want to be able to easily migrate stuff I buy from device to device over the years.

Answer 3

There is a technology called digital fingerprinting. You can embed a GUID based signature into the metadata of the EBook that the Distributor can link to the original sale of the book. It is not an overt method of identification in that your personally identifiable information is not out there for anyone to find and potentially exploit. But if your e books show up on Torrent or for download on your sites, the companies could potentially use it to build a case of copyright infringement.

This technique is used in many DRM protected books as well as it is basically a fairly trivial effort for most people to find a tool to strip the DRM from a book. The finger print means that the DRM can be stripped but the original copy can be traced back to the original buyer.

That said the fingerprint is not by itself proof that you broke copyright. But if you are linked to it through other methods as well, it can help a prosecutor or an attorney for the rights holder to make a case of infringement.