The great British Library DRM Flip-flop

Our tech support helpdesk recently received requests from a PhD student and a member of staff to install something they needed to read documents requested from the British Library. A proprietary Adobe system called 'ADEPT' was being used to prevent copying and distribution of papers requested from the BL's loan system.

Problem number one was that our PhD students, like many scientists, are enlightened enough to use Linux. There is no Linux version of ADEPT. Apparently Adobe promised one a year or so ago, but that promise disappeared from their web page. Now there's no plans for it. Thanks.

 I emailed BL customer service about this. Explaining both how DRM was a stupid idea and DRM with no Linux version was a dumb stupid idea. But not in those terms, of course. The customer services response was fun. First they said:

"It is unfortunate that your student has problems receiving documents in an elecronic format."

My response was that misfortune had nothing to do with it, but poor decisions on content-delivery did. They went on:

"We supply articles via Secure Electronic Delivery as customers want to receive them electronically." 

 Yup, we all love saving trees. 

"The need for encrypted documents is due to the current agreement the British Library has with publishers"

 Encrypted? Here's my GPG Public Key if you want to encrypt documents. I explained how this was not encryption, this was DRM, and was hence doomed to failure. At some point any DRM system has to let the user read the file, or hear the music, or see the movie, and at that point it is clear that any encryption has been decrypted. At that point the user has had, somehow, the decryption key. DRM is just obfuscation of encryption keys. Find the encryption keys and you can bypass the DRM.

And that has been done. There is published on the web a couple of quite short python scripts for bypassing ADEPT DRM. One gets the decryption key. From my reading of the code it seems to be stored in the Windows registry and mashed together with your PC's CPU identifier to tie it to your hardware. So you need an official ADEPT account and all that. 

Once that script has got the key, you run the second script on any DRMd files, using the recovered key to produce an unencumbered document (PDF file, usually). This you can print, copy to your laptop, backup and know the backup will be readable in whatever PC you have in ten years time, run through ps2text to create plain text and so on. All the things you'd love to do, and are probably legal, if you had a real copy in the first place.

Customer service went on:

"Your student may find it helpful to contact your University Library as they may be able to help by receiving and printing the documents for her. We also still supply Xerox copies by post."

 Tiiiiiimmmmmmberrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!

 The great mystery is how the BL's policy has changed in the last four years. I found this quote from a news website:

 [The] British Library when speaking to the All Parliamentary Internet Group in 2006, warned that the adoption of DRM technology would "fundamentally threaten the longstanding and accepted concepts of fair dealing and library privilege and undermine, or even prevent, legitimate public good access.

 

 *sigh*