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. . . .

Latest Library Links

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Camruinn Morgan-Rumsey and Lexi Lepof write: “On December 3, Knox County (Tenn.) schools received a list from the district of books to be removed from school libraries under Tennessee’s Age-Appropriate Materials Act. Knox County’s board of education voted in July, passing a policy to remove ‘explicit’ books from everyday student access in response to the new law. Some of the books on the list of nearly 50 titles might surprise parents. Among those to be removed are Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.”

WVLT-TV (Knoxville, Tenn.), Dec. 4
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Joe Foley writes: “Copyright rules vary from country to country and have changed over time. In the US, works created between 1929 and 1963 that gave notice and renewed copyright have 95 years from their first publication date. That means that on January 1, 2025, a host of works from 1929 will enter the public domain. This means that copyright will expire on Buck Rogers, Captain Easy, Horace Horsecollar, Tintin, Hal Foster’s first Tarzan comic strips and, yes, Popeye.” Other notable works entering public domain in the United States include the Marx Brothers’ first film, The Cocoanuts, contralto Marian Anderson’s first record, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

Creative Bloq, Dec. 7; Everybody’s Libraries, Dec. 3, Dec. 7; Public Domain Review, Dec. 10
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Brittany Adams writes: “The digital landscape of libraries is expanding rapidly, with an increasing shift towards electronic resources and online services. As members of the library community, we’re witnessing a transformative era where physical collections are complemented—and sometimes replaced—by digital ones. This transition offers new opportunities for enhancing accessibility and engagement, but it also presents challenges, especially for young patrons and their families. It is essential to equip children and their caregivers with the tools and knowledge they need to navigate this evolving space confidently.”

ALSC Blog, Dec. 9
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Karen O’Grady writes: “I am the embedded librarian for the Hahn School of Nursing at the University of San Diego. I am surrounded by nursing faculty, staff, and students rather than by librarians. This has proven to be an incredible gamechanger for the way I see things. Every student in my school knows me by name. I am often stopped in the hallway to answer questions. Every correct answer I give increases my authority and builds trust. Through these casual mini-lessons, this foreign animal called ‘librarian’ slowly becomes an approachable, knowledgeable person.”

College & Research Libraries News, Dec.
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ALA has selected 46 participants for its 2025 class of Emerging Leaders (EL). The EL program allows library staff and information workers to participate in project planning work groups, network with peers, gain an inside look into ALA structure, and have an opportunity to serve the profession in a leadership capacity early in their careers. The group will take part in a day-long session during the 2025 LibLearnX conference in Phoenix this January and work for six months, culminating in a poster session at ALA’s 2025 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Philadelphia in June, where they will highlight results of their project planning work.

ALA Office for Human Resource Development and Recruitment, Dec. 4
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On December 9, ALA announced a $25 million bequest by James W. Lewis, of Washington, D.C. The gift, the largest individual bequest in ALA’s history, will fund scholarships for aspiring librarians with demonstrated financial needs. Throughout Lewis’s career at Merrill Lynch, where he leads the Lewis Group as senior vice president and senior relationship manager, he has demonstrated his commitment to libraries and their communities by generously volunteering his time, including as a member of the Board of Visitors at the library of his alma mater, Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He also served as a Library Trustee Board member at District of Columbia Public Library for 10 years.”

AL: The Scoop, Dec. 9
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Tess Prendergast writes: “I will never forget the surprised look on one mom’s face during storytime when I dropped a tip—technically called an aside—about how rhyming helps babies differentiate sounds and prepares them for reading. “You mean that all this singing will help her in school?” she asked. “I thought we were just doing this for fun!” Early literacy activities are certainly fun—but also valuable. Many parents and caregivers aren’t aware that simple, everyday activities can benefit their child’s early language and literacy development and have a lasting positive impact on their learning.”

American Libraries column, Nov./Dec.

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The Fair Use Ebook Crack

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