Germany's Fraunhofer Institute recently revealed that it is working on a new digital rights management system, entitled SiDiM. DRM is what protects ebooks – and other digital products – from being shared against the wishes of their producers, an automated form of copyright enforcement. DRM tends to annoy everyone, as it often makes books harder to purchase, transfer between devices, and save for the future. As a result, it's frequently circumvented – plenty of free software exists on the internet to do this – and so other forms of protection, like fingerprinting, are employed instead. This involves making small changes to the code or design of each copy so that any pirated editions can be traced back to their purchaser or distributor.

The SiDiM proposal takes this to a new, literal level, by changing the actual words of texts. Examples include "not visible" for "invisible", "not healthy" for "unhealthy" – as well as tinkering with word order, subtle variations in punctuation, and so on. In this manner, many different versions of the text could be produced algorithmically with no loss of sense. Indeed, there is precedence for this: the "Mountweazel" is a made-up word inserted into a dictionary to catch unwary plagiarists, which originates in the fictitious Lillian Virginia Mountweazel who first appeared in the New Columbia Encyclopedia of 1975.

SiDiM is intended for nonfiction, of course, to protect textbooks and manuals, but its literary possibilities intrigue as well. Rephrasing in experimental fiction has a fine lineage, and it's not hard to see how an author might collaborate with the German algorithms to produce a new version of Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, or multiple variations on Georges Perec's A Void. Software already supports literature's production and distribution at every stage, but at some point it might become collaborator as well.