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Clearing out old tabs, I find this great post by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
free_govt_info, "New Best. Title. Ever" really exemplifies two points which are so strange about copy-blocked PDFs. This post showcases a government publication for which the PDF was released so that the text could not be copied out or the images extracted. First of all, this copy protection was completely legally unnecessary; the PDF was of a public domain government document, so it was crippled for no reason whatsoever. And more humorously, as you can see if you look at the various ETAs in the post, the electronic limitations of the PDF don't even work! It's very easy for anyone with technical know-how to break the protections on any PDF that's readable by the user, and without violating any provisions of the DMCA, either. As long as you can view it, you can copy and print it -- but you have to know how. So this government document, public domain and owned by the citizenry, was ineffectively and unnecessarily crippled. What's up with that?
Of course, this post is only made better by the fact that the government document in question, now available as an open PDF on the FGI post, is entitled "Hills Bros. Coffee Can Chronology: Field Guide. Awesome.
free_govt_info, "New Best. Title. Ever" really exemplifies two points which are so strange about copy-blocked PDFs. This post showcases a government publication for which the PDF was released so that the text could not be copied out or the images extracted. First of all, this copy protection was completely legally unnecessary; the PDF was of a public domain government document, so it was crippled for no reason whatsoever. And more humorously, as you can see if you look at the various ETAs in the post, the electronic limitations of the PDF don't even work! It's very easy for anyone with technical know-how to break the protections on any PDF that's readable by the user, and without violating any provisions of the DMCA, either. As long as you can view it, you can copy and print it -- but you have to know how. So this government document, public domain and owned by the citizenry, was ineffectively and unnecessarily crippled. What's up with that?Of course, this post is only made better by the fact that the government document in question, now available as an open PDF on the FGI post, is entitled "Hills Bros. Coffee Can Chronology: Field Guide. Awesome.
