[Sigia-l] Delivering documents for viewing only (no printing, no saving)

[Dave]

What Jason describes is true, I just wanted to add a few tidbits, as
my company's entire business is based on the use of PDF Protection or
Digital Rights Management.

Few things:

1. PDF's version of protection is very basic, unless you buy into
their whole Intelligent Document Platform (very cool product, btw).

2. You can protect on many different levels, but you can't (as Jason
mentioned) prevent a user from being smart enough from finding the
file itself in their temp directory and then forward the file onto
others w/ their password.

3. A good DRM solution will have password expirations.

4. very strong DRM solutions even have solutions that lock the opened
file to a specific user's machine using the MAC address #. This way
they can move the file wherever they want, but the next user will
never be able to open it.

5. good DRM will also prevent a user from taking a screen shot (and
cut & paste) of the data (obviously not with a camera), but few I have
seen prevent the user from outputting the video to another source
which can be captured on its own.

other solution providers besides adobe include Authenticate (sp?) and
FileOpen, among others.

-- dave

On 6/7/05, Cho, Jason <JCho at icmarc.org> wrote:
> PDF has the capability to secure documents against printing or editing
> contents (including copy/paste). You can also require a password to open
> the document, and even permit low resolution but not high resolution
> printing in newer versions.
> 
> Now, it could not be called unbreakable-- a web search on PDF password
> recovery is instructive-- but should suffice to discourage the average
> business user. Also, while you cannot save a secured document from
> within Acrobat, there is nothing to prevent the user from making copies
> of the file in the operating system.
> 
> -Jason Cho
> jcho at icmarc.org
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-- 
David Heller
E: dheller (at) gmail (dot) com
W: www (dot) synapticburn (dot) com