up-side

Posted Jun 4, 2009 1:09 UTC (Thu) by JoeF (guest, #4486)
In reply to: up-side by jospoortvliet
Parent article: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

A non-sequitur.

DRM to prevent opening or reading a file has absolutely nothing to do with this issue.
You'd have to encrypt the file to prevent unauthorized people from reading the contents.
That's the only way to enforce DRM.

This issue is about copying only. And preventing copying is, at least for text, simply impossible. If somebody wants to copy the text, the person can always re-type it. Even for diagrams, I can just take a screenshot.
All this flag does is making things more inconvenient.

up-side

Posted Jun 4, 2009 11:57 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

Point is that preventing copying like this works just fine in most cases. Especially if you know (like in the example I gave) that you're not allowed to try to circumvent it. This is like a 'soft DRM' function. Pretty easy to circumvent, but that's no problem. Inconvenient is good enough here.

Anyway, you think the functionality is useless. I think it has it's usecases. You should ask Adobe why they wrote it, and the companies using it why they do that, not me.