My first brush with DRM

I found that David McGowan's Programmed to Kill (no, it's not a book on programming) was available in eBook form, and seeing that it was a good bargain at $6, went ahead and bought it. I had bought an eBook from O'Reilly about a year ago, and didn't foresee any problems: you make the payment, you are taken to a download link, you download the PDF, and you are done with it.

Not so this time. I received an email containing the link, but on clicking it, I found that I did not have Adobe eBook Reader 1.1 installed. The page also contained a link to an eBook Reader download URL, which however produced a 404. Googling for 'adobe ebook reader linux' gave the first inkling of the trouble I was in: there was no version available for Linux.

Not willing to let my $6 go down the drain, I opened up my machine, swapped my Linux hard disk with the Windows one, and again tried the download URL, only to realise that I didn't have Adobe Reader 7.0 installed.

After a 28 MB download, the download URL finally did what it was supposed to do, but not before asking me to activate things by using my .NET Passport ID. Which I proceeded to do, and lo and behold, Page 1 of the book finally appeared before my eyes.

During the activation process, I was informed that it would be possible to transfer my activation rights to any other computer that I owned, so I proceeded to make a copy of the PDF and emailed it to myself in order to access it from Linux.

Swap hard disk, boot into Linux, open Gmail, download copy of PDF, fire up acroread, open said PDF, and I get a message saying that I do not have a required plug-in. kpdf was a bit more helpful, prompting me for a password (what password?).

OK, where do I sign up? To take part in the anti-DRM campaign, that is.