[scribus] Security on exported PDF

[Bert Driehuis]

Dear Jason,

It is impossible to perfectly protect a PDF against piracy. Even
Adobe's DRM offering is no match for a determined pirate, and that DRM
implementation is very user unfriendly to the reader.

If you can control the distribution, your best bet is to watermark the
file with the user's name, do not set the user password, and set the
owner password to a random string that you discard. That will protect
the file against tampering with most off the shelf software, without
limiting the usability of the file. If you stamp the purchaser's name
in the left margin they are likely not too annoyed.

I'm using Scribus to generate my PDF's and upload them to my server.
The server then watermarks them using a combo of libreoffice and
pdftk. I can give you an example script to get you started.

With kind regards,
Bert

On Mon, Jan 28, 2019 at 3:42 AM John Jason Jordan <johnxj at gmx.com> wrote:
>
> I have a book that I'm about to lay out, preferably with Scribus, and
> it will be published in PDF format. (The first time I've ever done
> that.) Sales will be over the internet, so I'm trying to figure out how
> I can stop piracy.
>
> I started by creating a one-page dummy .sla file with just a text frame
> filled with Lorem ipsum. I exported it as PDF and on the Security tab I
> deselected all the options, including no copying and pasting, and
> exported the file. Then I opened the file in Evince (Xubuntu 16.04),
> which required the password that I set to open the file, but once the
> file was open I could copy and paste the text.
>
> I think I don't understand what I'm doing here. And I may be going
> about this the wrong way. Perhaps there is a completely different
> approach. After all, if I require a password to open the file a pirate
> can just send the recipient the password along with the PDF.
>
> I'm scratching my head here. I need some suggestions!
>
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