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Okular is doing the right thing. NOT.Okular is doing the right thing. NOT.Posted Jun 2, 2009 14:31 UTC (Tue) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270)In reply to: Okular is doing the right thing. NOT. by smurf Parent article: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions
The common use of the "No copying" flag is corporate. The documents I've seen with copying disabled have usually been either proprietary corporate documents, marketing materials that weren't authorized for release, yet, and materials received from a third-party under NDA.
None of these sources believed the flag made it impossible to copy the document. However, the use of the flag means that a user copying the document has to be knowingly circumventing the flag. That makes it MUCH harder to argue in court that you didn't know you were breaking the rules when you copied a paragraph from a draft marketing announcement into a tech blog's rumor column.
I think supporting the flag, but allowing the user to circumvent it, is a nice balance between interests.
[NOTE: I'm less convinced than Jon that a court couldn't hold the flag to be considered to "effectively control access", but I don't think copyright is the real intended use of this flag.]
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Okular is doing the right thing. NOT. Posted Jun 3, 2009 0:13 UTC (Wed) by xilun (subscriber, #50638) [Link]
How does the "No copying" flag work with "cp"?
Okular is doing the right thing. NOT. Posted Jun 3, 2009 12:45 UTC (Wed) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link]
It has no interaction with "cp", it just disables the ability to take snips out of the document. The expectation is that people are more likely to leak a paragraph than a whole document (in part because the whole document is more likely to identify who it was sent to) and that it avoids the possibility of quotes being taken out of context.
Okular is doing the right thing. NOT. Posted Jun 4, 2009 1:20 UTC (Thu) by JoeF (subscriber, #4486) [Link]
"it just disables the ability to take snips out of the document."
No, it doesn't. It just makes it more inconvenient. I can still open a text editor next to the PDF and re-type the snips.
Okular is doing the right thing. NOT. Posted Jun 4, 2009 14:28 UTC (Thu) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link]
Agreed, and that's clear in other comments I have made in this strand - it disables the ability to take snips out of the document without overriding the restriction.
The point (from my perspective) is just to make sure the user knows he's breaking the author's rules.
Okular is doing the right thing. NOT. Posted Jun 23, 2009 12:51 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]
Precisely. The point is to make it necessary for you to testify that you turned the protection off in order to copy the data.
I, personally, am on the side of the developer straight down the line here, and I think that the people whining about this need to go take a cold shower.
It'd be real interesting to hear rms's opinion on this: do you violate the spec in the name of "freedom!!!", or do you respect the spec? I'm sure he'd say violate it... but I think that knocks just a little chink in his armor, myself.
We *need* people like rms, don't get me wrong.
Just like we need lawyers.
But that doesn't mean we should do everything either of them say to.
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