I just came across this new system being developed by Google, called Google Print. The idea is that they scan in an entire book, or just the portions that the author requests, and they make the book searchable, and allow users to view some of the pages within the book. The idea is to give the users a better idea about the content of the book in order to help increase sales.

One of the features of the system is that they claim to have disabled cut and copy operations. That’s easy, the book pages are images, so of course the text cannot be copied like that. The other protection feature they claim is that Save Image functions are also disabled. However, their method of doing so is pathetic, and of course, once I found an example page, it took less than 2 minutes to bypass it, and set up Firefox to allow me to save all of the pages that I could access.

However, I should point out that I had already read a few posts on the topic that explained how the site was set up and some ideas of how to bypass it, but none seemed to present a method as simple as this.

Basically, the book image is added using a CSS background, which is placed behind a transparent gif. The problem is that this transparet gif covers the element with the background image, thus attempting any user from right-clicking, and selecting View Background Image and then saving it. Some of the previous ideas suggest from other blogs and comments include viewing the CSS or looking in the Page Info dialog on the Media tab to get the URI of the image, entering it in the location bar and viewing it. That’s quite easy, but takes a few too many steps. The answer is as simple as adding a single style rule to your userContent.css in Firefox, or an equivalent setting or config file for your user agent.

img[src="images/cleardot.gif"] {
    visibility: hidden;
}

All that does is hide the transparent gif and allow you right click, to select View Background Image. Although I don’t normally promote stealing copyrighted material, my aim is just to show that DRM doesn’t work, and is very useless. I think Google should just give up on such a pointless system, because the more you try to protect something, the more people try to break it, and quite often succeed.