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?

  • Atropos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    1 year ago

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

      • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
        16·
        1 year ago

        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.
      • amigan@lemmy.dynatron.meEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        If you use ghostscript, it absolutely should, but you’re probably better off using something like cpdf.