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Re: preventing downloading
On Sat, 16 Mar 1996, G. Foulds wrote:
> > (Portable Document Format) support the ability to determine what a user
> > can do with a particular document. Regions of text, images, and the
> > entire document can be locked to prevent printing or selecting. PDF
> > files must be viewed with PDF viewer, and are created with Adobe Acrobat
> > Exchange. You can create PDF files from any application, including
> > desktop publishing programs, graphics packages, etc.
>
> THat's true... but no amount of creative PDF viewer configuration can
> stop me from just running a screen/image grabber, and helping myself
> to the information...
Sure, but a format like this makes it reasonably obvious what the
owner/publisher of the document has intended for its distribution. One
can always explicitly state such intentions in the document, but this can
be cumbersome. For most users, I suspect such embedded restrictions would
suffice.
It would be much more difficult to extract the text from the screen
image, for one thing, which is a large concern for some document
publishers who don't want to see their content extracted and reused.
One would have to apply some sort of OCR software to the screen image to
get ASCII text back.
With digital media, there will always be methods to get around any
copyright management technology. I guess the questions are: is it easy
or practical to circumvent, and what legal recourse will the author have?
-brian
--
Brian W. Spolarich - ANS CO+RE Systems - briansp@ans.net - (313)677-7311
See Brock acquire. Acquire, Brock! Acquire!
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