PDF Piracy

sebinspace@lemmy.world to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 142 points –

I am officially an old person, as I have subscribed to a magazine. It’s niche, but it’s been around a long time, and having enjoyed a lot of issues in my childhood that were given to me for free, I feel I should give back.

I’m wondering if there are precautions I should take. Can any sort of copy protection be put into PDFs that I should strip out? If I share them as a torrent, should I be worried that the publisher can tell where they came from?

21

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

I think if you print the PDF to another PDF, it'll lose any copy protection or potential identifiers.

Can anyone confirm this? Would make the whole process very macroable

The easiest way to confirm this would be:

  1. Find out how to list the metadata from a PDF.
  2. List the metadata from a known-to-have-stuff-you-don't-want PDF.
  3. "Print" the new PDF from the old one
  4. List the metadata from the new PDF.

This obviously assumes that you know exactly what metadata you want to eliminate and how to view it.

The OP’s whole point of asking is that they don't know the former.

This, essentially. Like until I tried to move music from iTunes to Foobar, I didn’t learn that metadata was even a thing, and apparently neither does Apple.

If you use ghostscript, it absolutely should, but you're probably better off using something like cpdf.

Buy two PDFs with different accounts and hash the result?

Adobe and Microsoft PDF printers retain some information. If you run it through ghostscript you'll get only the PostScript output. You can use a free utility like cutepdf to make it easy. Just install the latest gs release after installing cutepdf instead of the download they provide.

I imagine this destroys hyperlinks. Maybe machine-readable text too