[clue-tech] Making PDFs on the fly.

[Richard Knechtel]

>"The reason I'm looking into doing this is to prevent people from uploading
and sharing their copies.
>"

This will be a waste of your time, your better off putting the time 
elsewhere. Trust me.
I can tell you from experience (having hung out with the "cracking crews" 
in Europe for a few years in another life) there isn't -any- form of copy 
protection that can't be broken, overridden etc.. Remember dongle 
protections (hardware protection scheme) - those have been circumvented to 
many times to count. I remember circumventing one of the first ones on the 
Amiga for Superbase professional - all we did was get the same resistor 
used in the dongle at a local Radio shack and we built a dongle. Nowadays 
they "hack" the code to eliminate the call to the dongle. Hardware 
protections just don't work. All you need is a good multi-meter and some 
common sense and it can be defeted. I even tried to come up with the "full 
proof" protection for my software when I started writing my own to try and 
sell. I thought I had the slickest thing since sliced bread and it got 
broken by a couple guys I knew. I purposely asked them to try and break it. 
Embeded graphics can be cicumvented too, there are plenty of ways to 
"reverse" a PDF file and cropping out graphics embeded in them would be 
fairly trivial. Your best bet is to try to appeal to peoples honesty. Yes 
many are not, but if you provide a service, software, etc.. at a fair price 
people will buy it and not just flat out pirate it. See iTunes.

I don't bother anymore, now I just let someone pay me to write software for 
a job and on my own time I just write Open Source/GPL software and just 
"share and share alike". Protections are just a waste of time. If you want 
to read a good book on the subject of copy protection find a book called 
"The Protection of Computer Software and its Technology and Applications" 
2nd edition published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The 
British Computer Society Monographs in Informatics , ISBN 0521424623

Just my 2 Drachma's worth.