About Copy Protection in Documentation Security Systems

In an effort to prevent the abuse of PDF documents, publishers are increasingly looking to document security systems to ensure that they get full value for their creative works. Top on the list for each system is that it should provide adequate copy protection considering that duplication is the easiest way to pirate documents.

We should appreciate that document encryption will not be sufficient in securing content since once the authorized user decrypts the document he/she can do anything with it besides just making copies. However, the use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) controls can effectively address this vulnerability and as such any document security tool worth its salt must feature aspects of encryption and DRM controls.

It also suggested that these systems should feature a disable paste function in addition to the copy protection mechanism. However, a system that can adequately prevent copying should not need a disable paste mechanism because in the first place if you cannot copy a document then surely there will be nothing to paste!