Why DRM sucks

Posted on Friday, April 16, 2010 in Intellectual property

Why DRM sucks

Some time ago I bought an eBook in PDF format. Yes, I paid for it. And it seems that the distributors thought that it would be a great idea if I couldn't open the file with any PDF reader or if I couldn't select, copy or print text from that book, so they protected it with a proprietary plug-in for Adobe Acrobat.

Now I need to read this PDF, so I thought that I would have to install that plug-in, but then I realized that the plug-in is no longer maintained (at least for Linux) and it doesn't work with current Acrobat versions so I can't read the PDF I paid.

Finally, I had to crack the PDF. And I had to use an old version of Advanced PDF Password Recovery since Elcomsoft had to remove some of the features of its software due to pressure from FileOpen. This doesn't surprise me, removing its protection using APDFPR was so easy that it proves that "solutions" like FileOpen are useless and only causes annoyances to users with little advantages to distributors.