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PDF Piracy (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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I am officially an old person, as I have subscribed to a magazine. It’s niche, but it’s been around a long time, and having enjoyed a lot of issues in my childhood that were given to me for free, I feel I should give back.

I’m wondering if there are precautions I should take. Can any sort of copy protection be put into PDFs that I should strip out? If I share them as a torrent, should I be worried that the publisher can tell where they came from?

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[–] 17 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I think if you print the PDF to another PDF, it'll lose any copy protection or potential identifiers.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Can anyone confirm this? Would make the whole process very macroable

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The easiest way to confirm this would be:

    1. Find out how to list the metadata from a PDF.
    2. List the metadata from a known-to-have-stuff-you-don't-want PDF.
    3. "Print" the new PDF from the old one
    4. List the metadata from the new PDF.
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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    This obviously assumes that you know exactly what metadata you want to eliminate and how to view it.

    The OP’s whole point of asking is that they don't know the former.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Adobe and Microsoft PDF printers retain some information. If you run it through ghostscript you'll get only the PostScript output. You can use a free utility like cutepdf to make it easy. Just install the latest gs release after installing cutepdf instead of the download they provide.

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