alas, ematter is not secure
as a potential content-for-pay publisher, i have briefly investigated several systems which promised to offer easy superdistribution, starting with ye olde ibm cryptolopes (gone to product limbo), then the idealab experiment (defunct), and now vanity publishing sites such as www.mypublish.com and fatbrain/ematter.
when ematter opened its kimono earlier this week, i purchased cheaply some encrypted material; the process itself is only as involved as typing a 20-some-digit number after doing the usual credit card dance.
however, i believe fatbrain gives authors a false sense of security by using encryption, because although the ematter file itself seems secure enough, the content is not, especially against screen capture utilities.
to see for yourself, just download 'SnagIt' (for windows) or 'Snapz Pro' (for macintosh). the .exe wrapper for ematter is windows-only for now, but this caveat should obtain for adobe's acrobat-with-web-buy system as well, unless they've recently figured out how to defeat screen capture. with one keystroke per page, you can grab a window to a file and send the material out "in the clear" to confederates, including yourself if you just want to read it on another machine as fair use.
other breaches would include re-scanning printed material or perhaps capturing and reconverting to .pdf any postscript send to a printer.
the stock company answer would likely be that the encryption is not so much for protection against bad guys but rather is meant to discourage "casual copying". however, folks are certainly trying to sell "high value" material at the site -- screen capture is casual enough, even in the presence of watermarking authors might use. further, since these utilities can do audio/video too, i can't imagine the multimedia combines trusting such a setup to protect quicktime music videos or animated features.
as pay-per-download, the ematter system is fine, but why bother with the inconvenience-making encryption? |
