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I don't think so
Authored by: robgbne on Jul 10, '02 10:01:36AM

The DCMA (as far as I know) is not the issue here. What is at issue is copyright, which exists on the intellectual property, not the digital image of the file. Printing to PDF does not defeat the file encryption anyway, it simply turns the print file into a PDF instead of a printer image (or Postscript file) - that's why it's so big. Heck, in OS X the file is conveted to a form of PDF for display (say Aqua).

The only reason to lock PDFs is to stop unintentional modification. There are many ways of modifying digital files before they are printed so that an altered file, when printed, looks like an original. You can only trust digital files that have used proper encryption and encrypted hash values to guarantee they are unaltered. You can't trust a printed version of a digital file - as a last resort you can always scan it back in and use OCR to convert it to text, modify it, then print it out.

Copyright is only breached if you re-publish the work - in part or in full - either singularly or as reproductions. Of course you can publish parts in a review or educational context, but only with proper acknowledgement of the original author.



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