Limit Access and Printing When Selling PDFs to Clients

Millions of businesses and corporations from various fields of expertise churn out financially viable content that is readily available all across the world on the Internet. The problem with such content is that it can be quickly replicated by printing copies and then used for individual monetary benefits.

So, how can you put an end to this duplication cycle? The foundation of protecting any kind of intellectual property on the Internet has always been “online security”. This means you need some form of document management system that will disable any kind of printing by disabling the printer drivers or by preventing printing within the application that is viewing the content.

But, will this be the end of all your woes? Unfortunately, it is not as simple as it sounds. Preventing printing of documents either means stopping it completely, or restricting the number of times a specific document can be printed – thereby creating a stringent control in the distribution of the printed material. Once printing has been achieved, the same printed documents are often scanned and republished. So, you also need to tackle reprinting.

One of the most popular methods of restricting the copying and sharing of printed material is identifying the person who printed the document. This is achieved in PDF documents by adding watermarks with the user’s details (i.e. their name, email address, etc.) as well as time and date stamps of when the document was printed. Watermarking in Digital Rights Management (DRM) ensures that the original creator of the PDF can quickly find the source of any duplicated printed copies. This also helps in ownership disputes as watermarks make it quite difficult for some other recipient to claim the right to the document and claim it as their own.

If you want to limit access to content for a certain period then you can use DRM to control subscriptions to documents. Subscriptions ensure that users have a limited time (usually a date period or a number of days from first use) to access the content. Once the subscription has expired, the access to the content is automatically disabled and it can no longer be viewed or printed.

DRM also provides various other services, such as locking PDF files to specific devices so documents cannot be copied and used on non-approved computers, disabling the “File Save” or “File Save As” options, disabling Ctrl C and Ctrl V as well as the right click button, and disengaging the print screen button to prevent simple screen capturing. All these controls help to prevent any form of copying that can take place and thus prevent content being used by others for profitable gains.  But sometimes you need to split pdf online and there are options for that too.

Ultimately, DRM is the most efficient solution in protecting your income source by primarily protecting the rights of your content. With good DRM tools available for protecting documents, duplicating content matter has become tougher. So, install a good DRM tool for your documents to help ensure none of your PDFs are plagiarized and allowing you to maintain a steady flow of monetary gains for the future.

What do you think about using DRM for PDFs sold to clients? Feel free to share your opinions below.

Author Bio:

Karishma is a freelance writer. Her positive thoughts and creative writing helped her to publish in different high profile blogs. Currently she has been working as a freelance content writer at Locklizard, provides DRM software that helps to protect pdf documents and files.

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