Making the Case for Document-Level PDF Rights Management
A decade ago, Adobe and future merger partner Glassbook published Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet, a 16,000-word short story, as the first major eBook. Its digital rights management (DRM) failed as hackers hacked, King got mad, Amazon ended up giving it away. The eBook—and DRM—suffered a brutally black eye.
About the same time, iTunes rose and record labels struggled to rein in MP3 music pirates, DRM as a technology got beat up badly, caught in a riptide between freethinking music consumers and bottom-line-oriented copyright owners.
Adobe, somewhat quietly, released a product called Policy Server (currently part of the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite), and later, Digital Editions, to rights-manage documents and eBooks. Even it wasn’t without hitches, as arguments over text-to-speech features erupted between publishers—who reap revenue from audio books—and advocates for visually impaired readers.
Yet despite the hard knocks DRM has taken in the mainstream media, DRM has become an essential technology of the electronic documents world, protecting and tracking use of business-critical data. Without it, PDF would never have supplanted paper as the standard electronic document. Most businesses have some content, somewhere, that needs some level of protection—be it sensitive internal data circulating among employees or external communications going out to customers and partners.
DRM in the PDF world can mean a lot of things, from simply password security to more elaborate schemes. Typically, though, the DRM decision involves considering the following issues:
• Overcoming software issues: Some vendors offer DRM, but PDFs can only be read in a custom viewer or in Acrobat Reader only after installing a custom plug-in. While these schemes can be effective, they offer a layer of inconvenience and pose tech-help issues for already stretched IT staffers.
• Track or disable pass-alongs: For proprietary content like research reports or e-books that took a considerable investment to assemble, limiting opening to one computer can be a good business model—if people pass it along, it stays locked but offers the recipient and opportunity to purchase an unlocking code. At minimum, document owners can block pass-along recipients from opening a document until they register an email, snail mail, and phone number to get to the content—making viral marketing a lead-generation tool.
• Deciding what level of protection the document warrants. Maybe everyone can look at it onscreen, but you should disable printing, copy/paste functions, or offline access.
• Expiring a document. DRM offers owners of catalogs or drafts of documents a way to expire or update a document, which comes in handy when, for example, you need the 2008 price list to be rendered inoperable. Or it’s not advantageous to have a draft of a contract or purchase agreement floating around a company’s email system.
One final decision, as always, involves analyzing costs. The main upside to setting up your own server for PDF DRM is that you maintain custody of your documents at all times during the process. A much less expensive option is purchasing DRM on a per-document basis from a trusted vendor, who can host your documents online and can administer the DRM on your behalf and let your company test-drive DRM or roll it out on a small scale for a limited set of documents.
Although some vendors offer one form of PDF DRM (hosted or server-side) or another, only Vitrium is doing both right now with ProtectedPDF, offering a cost-effective means to phase-in DRM based on need, with upgrades available when they become necessary.
