By changing a few points and a few commas, or by entering some synonyms in a text, you can make an e-book unique, trackable and traceable.

That’s the thought of a new form of DRM developed by researchers at the Darmstadt Technical University in Germany. The researcher launched project SiDiM, a mechanism to find DRM innovations.

With the rise of smartphones and tablets, as well as e-readers, e-books sales increase year after year, albeit at a slower pace than expected. Nearly all digital libraries sell their e-books with some sort of DRM (copy protection), either through a proprietary system like the Amazon Kindle, or the most widespread Adobe reader. However, all of the DRM can be removed in seconds, allowing indiscriminate copying of e-books.

The project goal of SIDIM is to develop new protection measures for eBooks and electronic documents. The researchers at the Technical University of Darmstadt suggest that publishers can use SiDiM program to make subtle changes in the text of each e-book that is being sold. This is to ensure that each copy has a slightly different text, which should help to determine its origin in case of unauthorized copying.

“The goal of the SiDiM project is to develop new protection measures for eBooks and electronic documents. Texts in digital format are particularly threatened by unauthorized copying, for example via the Internet,” explains SiDiM’s Dr. Martin Steinebach.

“A solution to this problem is to alter documents with visible and invisible marks that make a single copy distinguishable. Users are encouraged to take responsibility their copy and it will deter illegal file-sharing, as copies can be traced using these marks,” the researcher adds.

Examples of these “subtle” changes include adding or omitting punctuation, changing word order in listings and replacing words with synonyms. In the online document, the German researchers mention some concrete examples. For example, a sentence like “In our world there are many races, nations and religions” can be changed to “In our world there are many nations, religions and races.”

SiliconANGLE Contributing Editor John Casaretto explains SiDiM solution could push back the reading habit of E-book reader and integrity of text document will compromise by that process.

“The process could really affect the text in number of different undesired ways. It may no longer carry the meaning of the content that was intended by Author originally,” Casaretto said.

He said the anti-piracy discourse must also be heard, especially from the point of view of the authors, for whom this is a real problem. The copy of an original will no longer be a true copy, but a derivative from the original in which some parts are lost for verification purposes.

Foolproof solution?

The idea of “text watermarks” is not new. Pearson’s Peachpit have created custom copies of e-books. Harry Potter books from J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore site had watermarking from a Dutch company called Booxtream.

The researchers speak of a consumer-friendly DRM-variant, because these consumers do not impose restrictions on the use of e-books. Whether the system is waterproof remains to be seen. It is unclear to what extent the system takes into account changes that distributors of pirated copies may themselves make in texts. Also, the system is potentially vulnerable to errors, because it is fully automated and no editing takes place on the custom text.