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 Maintaing ebook copyright - why encryption is not enough to protect your ebooks

I can upload an e-book online and ensure that only people who pay for the book can download it, but this does not stop anyone from making copies and distributing it freely. A common work around this problem is to password protect the e-book. So after a customer pays for the book and downloads it, he then receives a mail with the password to open the e-book he has just downloaded. Unfortunately that is no protection at all; the user who has just downloaded the file can actually copy the file and attach the password with each copy he makes. So in essence password protecting a file is no good.

So then what else can I do to protect my e-book? This is where DRM came up with a new method of protecting documents and other files. Whenever a user downloads my e-book, in the background he will also download a file that will contain the password to my e-book in encrypted format. The downloaded in the background is called a voucher or certificate, and every time a user tries to open my e-book, the e-book will look for the voucher; if the voucher is not present on the computer the e-book will not open assuming that the copy of my e-book is illegal.

So does using vouchers make DRM more effective? Partly, smart users can make out which file is being accessed when they try to open the e-book, and just like the password they can actually send the voucher with the as well. The only thing in favour of vouchers is that a majority of users are not savvy enough to figure out which files are being accessed whenever the e-book is accessed. With the number of internet and computer users increasing, the number of computer savvy users has increased, so my e-book is only partially protected.

So then what is the latest and the most effective in DRM? Well the idea is to tie my e-book into something that cannot be transferred from one computer to another, the hardware of the computer. DRM protection actually generates a file that uses the hardware on the computer to generate a unique ID. This file uses the CPU id or other distinctive hardware features to protect the e-book. So even if the e-book and the voucher file are sent to another user, obviously the hardware will not match and the e-book will not open on any other computer.