[infowarrior] - Is the Complete New Yorker Spyware?

[Richard Forno]

(The full article appears at the blogsite listed --- what is shown below is
the text describing how to back the software up to your hard drive, just in
case the blog entry gets....um....changed........rf)

Is the Complete New Yorker Spyware?
http://hooptyrides.blogspot.com/2006/01/is-complete-new-yorker-spyware.html

< biiiiig snip >

Question 4: Can I copy the Complete New Yorker to my hard drive, eliminate
the endless disk swapping, protect my originals DVDs and enjoy unprecedented
speed? Ed Klaris, general counsel and project director for the Complete New
Yorker, said that no you can't. Not for legal reasons, he said, but the New
Yorker decided it was adequate to be able to read a single disc at a time.
Reading issues chronologically is super practical and is a completely
reasonable way to read through a DVD, but if you want to read by topic
across the whole collection, it is totally preposterous. Search for
chinatown, goblin, Philip Johnson or Stanley Kubrick and you will drive
yourself insane with swapping. It's like having a Mac Plus.

If Ed says it is not for legal reasons, I guess you can load it on a hard
drive. It seems to conflict with paragraph 2 of the Prohibitions section
"...agree not to modify, translate", but Ed is the dictator.

How do you load it on a hard drive? Two ways.

Create disk images - ISOlator (Mac) and Alcohol 120 (PC) both seem to create
DVD images that work correctly while avoiding the Macrovision errors. To use
the images, you need to virtually 'mount' the images using Toast (Mac) or
Alcohol 120 (PC). When it asks for the appropriate disk, you mount the disk
image that is required. I have not tried this, but several Hooptyreaders
report good results.

Copy Issues to Local Hard Drive Issues Folder - This is a more elegant
solution. Oddly, although the Complete New Yorker is locked up in twenty
different ways, it relies on a public domain database called SQLite. There
is an Issues table in the database that has the complete list of every issue
along with corresponding DVD number. Each issue is assigned a number 1
through 8 plus 9 for the harddrive. If you copy every djvu issue file to the
local issues directory and change the issues table so that every issue
points to the local hard drive (9), then you can scream through the issues.
It is fast like the blazes. So elegant and beautiful. I downloaded a
shareware SQL database manager off CNet to make the changes, but individuals
smarter than I could do it with the free command line SQLite.



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