Vienna University Professor Exposes "Analog Hole" in E-Books

If you've been in the Copyright Wars long enough, you may remember the analog hole - the idea that you could extract the bits from a DRM-locked item when they were rendered out for display and then recapture those bits in a DRM-free format.

Well, it turns out that e-books have an analog hole, too. When they display character information on the screen it's possible to capture that display, OCR it, and render out a digital file with the book's contents unencumbered by DRM. We've known this was possible for a long time, but recently Peter Purgathofer, an associate professor at the Vienna University of Technology, built a demonstration of the capability. And since he used cool components like Lego's Mindstorms robot and free cloud-based OCR services it's getting some notice.

Purgathofer's homebrew analog hole-maker targeted Amazon's Kindle, but the concept applies to pretty much any e-reader. The issue is not with the Kindle per se, but with what Purgathofer correctly describes as a "a “dramatic loss of rights for the book owner." Yep, e-books still suck, just in case you had any illusions to the contrary.