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Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 2, 2009 13:07 UTC (Tue) by rjdymond (subscriber, #51625)
In reply to: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions by nhippi
Parent article: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

I don't see any argument on the xpdf site that justifies the restrictions on what may be done with a PDF. There is this:

"...it would be very hypocritical of me to, on one hand, ask people to honor my licensing restrictions, and, on the other hand, bypass (or assist others in bypassing) another author's requested restrictions."

But this is a flawed argument, because the xpdf author's licensing restrictions (GPL) are not the same as the document author's requested restrictions (no copying, printing. etc.). It's not hypocrisy if I ask you not to smoke in my house, but then eat doughnuts in your house against your express wishes. You could argue that it's inconsiderate, but how much that matters has to be weighed against the reasonableness of the requested restriction. I imagine most people here would agree that the GPL's restrictions are reasonable, but that trying to prevent someone from copying text from or printing a PDF is just dumb.

The xpdf author also says:

"In addition to all of this, Adobe requires that implementors of the PDF spec adhere to the document permissions."

But as has already been pointed out, blindly following a spec just because it's a spec is also dumb.


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Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 2, 2009 14:01 UTC (Tue) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

"I don't see any argument on the xpdf site that justifies the restrictions on what may be done with
a PDF."

There is no need to justify that -- whether the restrictions are justified or not is not the point at all.

" I imagine most people here would agree that the GPL's restrictions are reasonable, but that trying
to prevent someone from copying text from or printing a PDF is just dumb."

Yes, and in other places, most people would agree that the GPL's restrictions are just dumb. Just
because you make GPL software and don't produce encrypted PDF's makes you right in feeling that
you need to enforce the one and discard the other; because if you have that right, then anyone else
has the same right to make their own judgment calls. And use your GPL'ed code in their proprietary
applications.

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