The Fair Use Ebook Crack

July 25, 2012

Stupid me, I bought the ebooks I needed for a recent project through Apple’s iBookstore. That meant I couldn’t legally crack the DRM on them to copy passages as part of a fair use scenario.

Let me be clear, it isn’t the legal part of that previous sentence that is the issue. In this case, I believe it would be quite legal to crack the DRM on an ebook. If you read the law, the DMCA clearly makes it illegal to bypass DRM for the purpose of circumventing access controls. Bypassing for the purpose of circumventing copying controls, however, is legal because of fair use scenarios like the one in which I found myself this week.

And so here was my chance to stand up for my legal right to tear down that DRM.

I was all set to fire up Calibre, an open source ebook library, and then download a set of plugins that help bypass copy controls that were previously featured on Wired’s Gadget Lab.

These plugins, it must be noted, do not circumvent access control protections in DRM. That is a key legal issue. In fact, you can only use them to unlock DRM on content for which you have an active and proper key. What the plugins do is leave the content unlocked after unlocking it with the key already on your computer. The plugin author suggests, then, that this is a circumvention of copying protections only, since one must use a legal access method.

In theory at least. I am not a lawyer, and this may be way out of line.

So there I was, ready to unlock my books and copy passages for my fair use, instructional purpose. And then I remembered. Stupid me, I bought the books from Apple’s iBookstore and they updated their security again. Curses, foiled again.

Anyway, let me tell you about this really nice piece of software that can OCR a screenshot from iBooks. Really, it is almost as if you were copying and pasting right from an ebook for your fair use project—if by copying and pasting you mean just re-keying the passages because it would be faster.

I’ll get you next time, DRM. Next time. . . .

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The Fair Use Ebook Crack

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