[pdftex] pdftex-pdfcrypt update

[Mark A. Wicks]

On Thu, 29 Mar 2001, [iso-8859-1] Martin Schröder wrote:

> While it's nice to be able to produce _en_crypted pdfs (which
> will trouble your printing house), it would be equally nice to be
> able to _de_crypt included pdfs, i.e. include encrypted pdfs
> (where the only protection is the "changes not allowed" bit) in a
> pdf where the resulting file would not be encrypted.

    I hope that authors of PDF tools will respect the integrity of
encrypted PDFs.  Don't you think that pasting a piece of a document or
defeating the encryption on a document would be considered to be a
"change"?  The original author of the document (the person who owns the
copyright) chose to encrypt to protect it. That protection should be
respected and not removed or bypassed.  The method of document protection
described in the PDF specification *requires* that authors of PDF tools
respect the flags in the document such as "not printable" and "not
modifiable".  After all, if these flags are easy to defeat, what's the
point of encrypting your own documents?