Elegant Simplicity

I’m not a DRM fan. I never have been. I’m all for artists getting paid for what they do, but enough is enough. I’ve never purchased music online, and will not until I can buy DRM-free versions. I haven’t even bought a music CD in over 5 years because of the DRM on newer CD’s. Yes Sony, I’m talking to you. I’m boycotting the purchase of music because of DRM.

A couple of years ago I wanted to buy the definitive MAPI reference guide, InsideMAPI. As it was out of print at the time, the book and examples were conveniently available in electronic form from www.insidemapi.com. After about 3 or 4 weeks with nary a response to my order and credit card charge, I sent the author an email, and got a response a couple of days later stating that it had shipped about the time I sent my email. No problem, he missed the order, and got it shipped out to me when he realized the mistake. I’m cool with that.

A week or so later and I received a CD. Great!

The CD contained an installer, and running it installed a bunch of files to my hard drive (samples mostly), and a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0. Huh? Yes, that’s right. Acrobat Reader 4.0. I already had Acrobat Reader 7.0 installed, so I figured I’d just deinstall 4.0 later.

Sadly, things went downhill from there. The PDF book is an encrypted PDF (which I expected) but it used a third party plugin to Adobe Acrobat 4.0 for the decryption. This little plugin is called IMPlugin.api. This great little security feature doesn’t work in Acrobat 7.0 at all. Opening the PDF in Acrobat 7.0 causes a message to appear that Acrobat isn’t installed correctly or is missing some features (the plugin) and I should reinstall.

It didn’t occur to me until yesterday that Acrobat Reader 8.0 is out now and I still need to use a version of Acrobat with a version number half the current version to read a damn book. Welcome to the wonderful world of DRM. The people who come up with DRM assume that I have no moral values, and should be treated like a criminal. I spent a whole three days with a debugger attached to Acrobat Reader 4.0 figuring out exactly what the plugin does and how it works. It also scans every drive on the system looking for the original CD, so I can’t even read the book on my laptop that doesn’t have a CD drive. I spent the better part of 4 hours yesterday being a criminal. I disassembled the plugin. I dumped the Acrobat 4.0 process memory. I tried printing to a new PDF. I hex-edited the PDF. I won.

I now have a PDF that is just slightly smaller than the original PDF, but has absolutely zero DRM attached to it. It works in Acrobat Reader 7.0. It works in Acrobat Reader 8.0. I’m sure it will work in many future versions to come. The only thing I lost were the original bookmarks, but since the PDF is searchable, I just don’t care.

To the DMCA lawyers, I’m sorry I had to break the law to read a book I paid for it legitimately. When you figure out a way to verify my licenses for content without restricting how I use that content, I’ll be ready with my credit card.