DRM stupidity (was: Bug in acroread?)

On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 11:51:34 +0100, Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
Florian Kulzer wrote:
It is furthermore possible to write custom plug-ins which impose
additional restrictions. For example, we once got a reprint-PDF for an
article that we had published in a scientific journal. This PDF required
a plug-in so that it could contact the publisher's server to make sure
we could only print 50 high-quality copies of the paper. Needless to
say, this plug-in was only available for Windows. A nice way to take the
"P" out of PDF...

You should have complained to that journal. Their effort it just a
nuisance and a pain for all their users and has practically zero
benefit. For any decent office, one print-out with a pdf-printer driver
(available for Windows) are all that is required to create millions of
copies.

Indeed, it is just silly. Even using a normal Windows postscript printer
driver and "print to file" gets you around this quite easily. Of course,
the resulting postscript file has some special keywords embedded which
tell Adobe distiller not to make a PDF out of this file. It also has
some comments that tell you that you are not allowed to remove these
lines. This would be funny if it was not so sad.

However, complaining or pointing this out was completely useless,
because at best you get to harass some poor secretary who has no clue
what you are talking about in the first place. I might start to refuse to
referee papers for that publisher.

Alternatively, one could use one high-quality print-out and a decent
scanner.

Johannes

--
Regards,
Florian


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