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Break PDF DRM with Gmail?  (View post)

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

Tuesday, April 18, 2006
18 years ago6,358 views

I think the right link about CRAP concept is this:
http://news.zdnet.com/html/z/wb/6035707.html

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Ooops! Corrected, thanks.

/pd [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

This could be an issue, but pdf in webform is it a voliation of DRM ? This is also the issue that i notieced with images too... my images we displayed in the web pages of gmail , yet the attachment was actually a zip file.

Saul [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

I don't think this is true. I tried to read encrypted pdf as html in gmail, but it was impossible. A message beside my pdf was even attached that gmail could't even scan that pdf for viruses.

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Hello....

Nobody talked about encryption. It's just about document restricions like: copy not allowed, printing not allowed. Google converts PDF to HTML and the restrictions disappear.

Jim Barr [PersonRank 4]

18 years ago #

"Nobody talked about encryption. It's just about document restricions like: copy not allowed, printing not allowed. Google converts PDF to HTML and the restrictions disappear."

While this is true, it typically requires a password in Acrobat to remove these restrictions, so it could be argued that Google is circumventing DRM which could possibly violate the DMCA.

But then again, it could also be argued that this is analogous to making a recording of a DRM'd digital music file by digitally recording the analog sound coming from the sound card. It's a copy, but not an exact copy...

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I've looked into converting PDFs into HTML before and came across this:

http://pdftohtml.sourceforge.net/

This is based on xpdf 2.02 by Derek Noonburg:

http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

If you read Derek's page on "Cracking", he seems to suggest that it's possible to extract the text from protected PDFs, but he's chosen not to implement it, out of respect for the authors:

http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/cracking.html

I don't know for sure what Google uses to convert PDFs to HTML, but their HTML output is very similar to what xpdf / PDF2HTML produces...

Wouter Schut [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

You could also:
   – Open and re-save with Foxit-reader
   – Print a pdf to pdf (with pdfcreator)

It's just very hard to close an open format... i guess :P

Duane Nickull [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

http://slashdot.org/~nickull/journal/135008

sets the record a bit straighter

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