Someone new for the World Wild F (whatever it stands for) to sue.

PDFs cause you trouble? a-hem.

Glad I clicked on that, for a minute I was wondering why Constant was following professional wrestling. Actually, I don't want to go there.

@5 ratcityreprobate, World Wrestling Entertainment changed its name from the World Wrestling Federation in 2002 after a lawsuit from the panda bear people (WWF, which now "stands for" World Wide Fund for Nature instead of the World Wildlife Fund).

Good lord, why do I know these meaningless things.

Are these people not aware that the PDF format already includes functionality to disable printing? (e.g., http://www.ehow.com/how_6299874_disable-…)

Not that it doesn't take more than ten seconds to bypass, but this doesn't seem to be anything more than attention whoring by the WWF to get their name tied to a file format.

This is actually the best reason I've ever heard for locking down a PDF. Does someone need to see this that it cannot be emailed to?
(If you really, really, really want to hack into this, read up on Ghostscript readers. Chances are, you don't want it tha bad.)

#8 - 10 seconds to bypass? Please explain?

I use Document Viewer on Ubuntu Linux and I've never seen anything like that. Another reason not to use Windows or Mac. (I mean you can use Adobe stuff if you want, but why bother?)

Shit, I meant @7. Did I just call myself out?

@9 - you covered one of the ways yourself (Ghostscript), but there are plenty of ways to print a PDF that you can view but aren't permitted to print without a password. Screen capture, PDF crackers, or sites like freemypdf.com that do all of the screen capture/conversion work for you and gives you an unlocked PDF in return (images instead of text, but we're talking about printing here, not copy/paste functionality.)

Obviously if you need a password to even open the PDF that's a different story, but that's not what the WWF format proposes and thus the screen capture technique is easily transferable to this format, and presumably the freemypdf.com people could register freemywwf.com and basically re-use the current script.

Ahhh... interesting. Wasn't aware of freemypdf.com, thanks for that. The screen caps probably aren't so hot on text, but it's better than nothing should one be desperate.

It's been a long time since I really looked into the issue. Back then, I kept getting articles about Dmitri Skylarov's arrest, and figured people weren't really pursuing this issue as publicly these days. (which of course is silly, you obviously can't just take things off the internet.)