I don't see any reason why you should object to watermarking. Contrary to DRM it doesn't hurt real costumers at all and only helps finding people that distribute books without compensating the author.
Playing Devil's advocate, these watermarking increase the probability that innocent people will be convicted. Under the law, copyright infringement is not a strict liability tort, ie., one must be at least unreasonably negligent in allowing the work to be copied. But with this mechanism, if an ePub containing a watermark appears on a file sharing network, the buyer is always assumed to be the culprit.
As an example, imagine the user kept 24 books in a personal Dropbox account for easy reading across devices, and someone stole the account's credentials and released the books. The user is now on the hook for $200k in statutory damages despite being himself the victim of a crime instead of the perpetrator.
Some reasons why watermarks could be objectionable are covered in the accompanying Torrentfreak article (already linked in other comments here):
"'Books should be used as tools for disseminating knowledge and information. What ‘social DRM’ watermarking systems do instead is turn books into tools of surveillance and oppression by monitoring who shares what knowledge, where,' IBI explain.
"'We don’t like this, and because the publisher Verso has refused to remove the watermarks themselves, we decided to do it for them, and to show everyone how these systems work.'
"But there are bigger issues at stake. While people in the West take the freedom to read books of their choosing for granted, not everyone has that luxury.
"'Imagine if a watermarked ebook contains someone's name (as many do). Suppose that someone is reading that watermarked ebook under a regime that bans the particular kind of material covered in that book,' IBI add.
"'If the operatives of the regime see the watermark, they would then be able to arrest and perhaps even execute the purchaser of the ebook if they too are living under the same regime.'
"But matters of life and death aside, IBI say they believe that people should not only be able to read whatever they want, they should also be able to share that knowledge with others."
The first one lauds giving other people access to books for free, leading to the author not getting compensated. Not even DRM (which watermarking isn't) prevents you from sharing knowledge for free. Just write something on your own containing that knowledge and put it up for free.
The thing with the regime seems a bit constructed, but even then authors can just decide to publish those few books where this applies without watermarks. If your goal is to reach people living in a regime you would want to translate the text from english into the language of the place anyway (I don't know of english speaking regimes)
Thanks for that. The reading was a bit thick on the polemics, but I also found it an easy to read and understand overview of ebook watermark functionality for someone like me who's unfamiliar with the field.
Would this not qualify as "producing and disseminating technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent" DRM? Because that's a crime under the DMCA. But I'm just askin', you know?
It's a crime in the U.S., it's not a crime in my country. But this guy has listed American University's email address, so I would definitely remove this software if I were him.
In fact, if I were him, I would find someone not from the U.S. to host the repository, make it private, give him the read/write privileges and then occasionally push the changes to a new public repo (so that the .git folder is different and one could not track the changes as they happen).
A tor-ified github clone would be interesting. You'd probably see a lot of cool pro-freedom software projects that are illegal in their originating country, like this one.
Every day I see submissions here that are cracks, keygens, etc., and they always get flagged and killed.
I'm not familiar with BooXtream, specifically, but I'm curious what it is about this that is different? This is for DRM, sure, but it seems very similar to me.
> submissions here that are cracks, keygens, etc., and they always get flagged and killed
Those are almost always spammy. If there's something intellectually interesting about the post, that would be different. (Not saying that's the case here.)
This is a filter of sorts, not a cracker. Think of it like a reverse Instagram filter to restore the original photo. Whether that's within a certain jurisdictions disallowed things to do publicly I don't know.
I don't see any reason why you should object to watermarking. Contrary to DRM it doesn't hurt real costumers at all and only helps finding people that distribute books without compensating the author.