this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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PDF Piracy (lemmy.world)
submitted 11 months ago by sebinspace@lemmy.world to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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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?

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[–] Atropos@lemmy.world 16 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] sebinspace@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] danielquinn@lemmy.ca 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.
[–] Timwi@kbin.social 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sebinspace@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] theamigan@lemmy.dynatron.me 3 points 11 months ago

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

[–] exu@feditown.com 2 points 10 months ago

Buy two PDFs with different accounts and hash the result?

[–] doc@kbin.social 3 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] glibg10b@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 months ago

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