Hi Hannes,
I just wanted to mention that I very much agree with your reply, and wouldn't mind if it really was the joint statement of the pdfreaders-team ;-)
best, /Stian
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 01:22 +0100, Hannes Hauswedell wrote:
Hi Martin,
I am not sure to which version of pdf the DRM belongs and whether those classify as "open standards". We havent yet decided if we will offer more information on pdf-revisions, if yes, we will probably include information about DRM.
The question whether all versions of this standard should be rejected because some or all include the possibility for DRM is difficult to answer. This site was definitely not meant as an advertising campaign for PDF though, it was meant to inform about Software Freedom. PDF is widely used and the Adobe Reader is widely referred to; it is something "regular users" look for. The goal of pdfreaders.org is to establish an alternative source for PDF-Reader-downloads and using it to promote free useable alternatives ("the readers") aswell as the social and ethical idea of software freedom.
Concerning the PDF-DRM in reality: The concept is security by obscurity, the printing block does not involve encryption of any kind. If the file is encrypted than the "user-password" is sufficient to get full access to the file.
I am not sure about Sumatra, but Okular and KPDF offer a checkbox for ignoring DRM in the settings. You can then also print an encrypted file to an unencrypted file (if you have the user-pw). xpdf does not (it is not hard to patch though, I did it a while back) Evince ?
But the whole point of Software Freedom is that all kind of DRM implemented can be removed! Therefor I am decidedly against removing a certain free software-reader because we don't like the developers' stand on DRM. As long as the software is free, it can be altered to ignore the DRM. This is main message we should convey.
Please note that this is just my own opinion and not a joint statement of the pdfreaders-team or fsfe.
In Solidarity Hannes
Am Mittwoch, 14. Januar 2009 21:44:37 schrieb Martin Eklund:
Hello! My name is Martin Eklund, a member of FSF since about a year. Sometime ago I was reading this spec:
http://www.midi.org/about-midi/gm//gmguide2.pdf/
I wanted to grab some sentences to my notes, so I pressed ctrl-c, however it did not seem to work. I looked in various menus and I was furious when I found out this apparent bug, was actually announced as a "feature" in the pdf reader.
Maybe I am mistaken, but I do believe this DRM is not just implementation, it is actually a part of the pdf standard. To give "content-creators" the power to block copying, and printing of documents. (taking control away from the end user)
In my mind, this is clearly against the philosophy of FSF. This kind of stuff is also implemented in the some of the software you are listing on the campaign site. At the sumatra pdf changelog:
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/news.html
one can read, at "0.6 (2007-04-29)"
"don't allow printing in PDFs that have printing forbidden"
I like standards, and pdf is technically quite ok. But I cannot fully embrace a standard claiming that apparent bugs are features. The best way to handle this would be to create a kind of "relaxed mode" pdf, where the DRM parts of the standard are avoided.
Perhaps all this was discussed before the campaign was launched, I don't know. Let me know your thoughts on this.
Peace. /Martin http://music.teadrinker.net
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