[poppler] Re: Permissions (was Re: poppler-glib)

[Kristian Høgsberg]

Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
> At 10:54 AM 3/18/2005, Kristian Høgsberg wrote:
> 
>> But I don't want poppler to enforce these settings, that's a choice 
>> the application has to make. 
> 
> 
>         No, actually it is not.
> 
>         The PDF Specification is very clear that in order for a PDF 
> consumer to be granted the necessary rights for use of Adobe copyrighted 
> material - they are required to respect the digital rights of a PDF.  
> See Section 1.5 (Intellectual Property) of the PDF Reference
> 
>     Authors of software that accepts input in the form of the Portable
>     Document 
>     Format must make reasonable efforts to ensure that the software they
>     create respects 
>     the access permissions and permissions controls listed in Table 3.20 of 
>     this specification, to the extent that they are used in any
>     particular document.
> 
> 
>  I know that kpdf recently went through a flamewar over this very issue
>         I wasn't part of that war - but the issue is crystal clear and 
> no debate is required.

It's hardly crystal clear.  Ignoring the issue about copyrightabilty of 
a file format, I think it's a defendable position to say that for a PDF 
rendering library to export the means necessary to implement copyright 
protection is "reasonable efforts", which is what is requested in 
section 1.5.

cheers,
Kristian