Anti-piracy and privacy

Sat, 10 Aug 2013 12:23:40 GMT

In the Dutch language area (Netherlands and Flanders) most e-book publishers changed from using DRM to using a watermark since February. It's now something like 62% with watermark, 24% with DRM and 14% without either. I was hoping that more with move to the watermark, but it doesn't seem to change much.

The watermark in the e-books are used to find the original buyer in case of piracy. The information in the e-book does not itself identify the buyer, it just some random ID. That ID can then be used to trace back to buyer.

We work with a 3rd party to deliver the e-books to our consumers. They get a random string from us that we can use to trace back the order, and from there we can trace back who bought it. The 3rd party than generates their own random string and puts that in the e-book. They only only keep those 2 random strings, and so have no way to trace this back to the buyer, we are the only one that known who bought it. And I think this is how it should work. I think this is also what the privacy laws require us to do.

But now we got a new contract that states that we must directly give information about the buyer if some anti-piracy agency (BREIN) finds an e-book file online. We must keep the information about the buyer for minimum of 2 years and maximum of 5 years. And if we don't sign the contract we won't be allowed to sell e-books with watermark anymore.

So this means that they want to bypass the normal judicial system, and probably contact those buyers they accuse of piracy directly. I questioned that this was legal. They say that it is legal according to the Dutch privacy law, but I have a hard time interpreting any of the options in article 8 as that we can give that information without the explicit consent of the person.

I guess you can interpret option f in several ways, and that their lawyers do it differently than me. This will probably remain unclear until some court decides on it.