How to protect documents from being shared/pirated?

[chris79]

My friend is starting a business which involves the distribution of knowledge contained in office documents.

Probably the biggest risk to the business would be piracy and copying of the files.

Does anyone know a good way to protect the files? They are distributed on usb drive / CD / download.


Thanks.

[Moscow Mule]

Anything which is simple text is copyable, whatever you do to try and prevent distribution.

[RichardCranium]

Consider MOD documents marked Secret. There are documented procedures, special training, only checked out people can access the documents, special safes, all sorts of protection.

They get left in the back of cabs.

You cannot stop people faxing, photocopying or simply stealing documents or the media they are stored on.

[chris79]

Hmm yeah, was thinking more along the lines of watermarking the docs. I found one application which batch converts them all to .pdf and watermarks them, but the problem is some docs need to be editable.

[RichardCranium]

Hmm yeah, was thinking more along the lines of watermarking the docs. I found one application which batch converts them all to .pdf and watermarks them

There's a company called SkillsPride that I use for my soft skills training. They provide just that: faintly watermarked .PDFs that say where they have been stolen from, and that cannot easily be copy 'n' pasted.

, but the problem is some docs need to be editable.

Oh. Damn. Is their a formal business relationship with those doing the editing? If so, wrapping it up in contracts may be the best bet.

[dinker]

Don`t Word documents contain metadata identifying the creator?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...ice.11%29.aspx

[DiscoStu]

Don`t Word documents contain metadata identifying the creator?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...ice.11%29.aspx

Doesn't stop anyone printing it out then scanning it with OCR software to create a new document.

[VectraMan]

Hmm yeah, was thinking more along the lines of watermarking the docs. I found one application which batch converts them all to .pdf and watermarks them, but the problem is some docs need to be editable.

PDFs can be editable. Not sure how it all works though.

If you can read it, you can copy it. But there are pleanty of ways to display text that can't be simply cut and paste, which is better than nothing. A screengrab and OCR would defeat it though.

[Spacecadet]

how many clients are going to be recieving these documents?

If it is a small number then it might be simpler to give each client their own version of each document. Only needs to be slightly different (a few word changes here and there), but the difference will be enough to allow you to trace a leak should said document appear on a file sharing system.

Still, unless you envisage 10's of thousands of people using these documents then chances are they will never appear on any file sharing sites anway

[DimPrawn]

http://www.fileopen.com/fileopen_pdf...FU0B4wodL1dZjg