I'm reading some of the works as part of the Hugo voter packet and some of them have what at first appears to be poor editing. Something that looks like an artifact of badly done OCR. Mostly missing spaces between words or a missing hyphen. But these are digital works, presumably straight from the publisher. Not something that should have any errors like this.
It got me thinking that this must be some form of text based watermarking to uniquely identify me, or perhaps any works that are pirated from the voter packet. I know that they've done similar things to digital music / videos, but usually in places where people wouldn't notice. I think in theaters they are disguised as those old dust spots that you might see on a frame of film, but since there are no frames of film from the digital projector, it couldn't be those. It's something that people are used to, so their brains probably just skip right over it.
It's distracting. It's like someone lightly slapping you every once and a while. It wrecks the flow of the work and makes the work feel like a poorer quality than I think that it really is. Along those lines, it's disappointing.
I hate drm. I hate this type of fingerprinting. And I hate being made to feel like a criminal when I enter into a agreement in good faith. It's that kind of shit that turns customers into pirates.
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