Piracy Issues Abound for Shueisha-Microsoft Mobile Manga Initiative

Recently, Microsoft and Shueisha jointly announced the forthcoming launch of a new mobile manga service for Microsoft Windows Mobile based devices beginning in December via the recently launched Marketplace for Mobile application store currently compatible with devices running Windows Mobile 6.5 (compatibility with older devices running Windows Mobile 6.0/6.1 is said to be arriving later this month) for free, with the move to a paid model by next March.

The service will be offered in Japanese and English in 28 countries, including Japan and the United States, as well as Europe. The first offering will be a free sample version of Dragon Ball with no further specifics on titles.

Read More for an in-depth explanation of current issues with Marketplace for Mobile and its potential to kill this paid manga initiative before it even gets off the ground.

The biggest concern that both Shueisha and Microsoft need to pay attention to (and has so far been ignored in initial and follow-up reporting by other organizations) is the relative ease in which the DRM that the comics will be wrapped in can be defeated, as shown in this XDA Developers thread as a proof of concept, which defeated Microsoft’s “more advanced copy protection” in two hours after first being updated by the company yesterday morning.

Microsoft’s protection schemes provided to developers in the Marketplace so far have amounted to weak license wrapping and authentication schemes that do not work very well in practice and are easily cracked with just a few lines of code and a combination of appklication editing or running a dummy executable in the background which bypasses the DRM completely

Microsoft currently does not allow individual developers to utilize their own licensing or protection schemes, forcing developers that want to be listed on the Marketplace to rely on the company for application protection.

If both Shueisha and Microsoft are to move to a paid content model for this initiative next year, they must take into account the ease in which Marketplace applications can be pirated their current form and take steps to reinforce their own DRM solutions or create another secure authentication system entirely, unless Microsoft wants to risk pissing off Shueisha after intrepid crackers inevitably start uploading the paid manga titles without DRM.