[Gllug] BBC on Microsoft DRM in new Outlook

[Richard Cohen]

On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Bernard Peek wrote:

> In message
> <Pine.LNX.4.44.0310211013130.31064-100000 at druifje.clustervision.com>,
> John Hearns <john.hearns at clustervision.com> writes
> >On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Richard Jones wrote:
> >
> >> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3207258.stm
> >>
> >>
> >And at the end of the article:
> >
> >"Whereas Office can cost hundreds of pounds, OpenOffice can be downloaded
> >for free over the internet. "
> >
> >
> >ps. even though forwarding a mail could be blocked,
> >can Windows somehow disable cutting-and-pasting of choice juicy blocks
> >of text from within a doksayed email?
>
> DRM will disable cut-and-paste except as permitted by the owner of the
> document. You can already do that if you create PDF files with Adobe
> Acrobat. You can still photograph the screen and paste the picture into
> another app.

Unless of course you use something like xpdf or pdf2html and have a quick
look at the code.  The 'do-not-copy' and 'do-not'print' bits are just that -
a bit set in the header of the file to tell the software not to allow
copying or printing.

It would - in theory of course, I'd never do such a thing, no, never - be
trivial to modify the software to simply return "no, the do-not-copy bit
isn't set" and "no, the do-not-print bit isn't set" at the appropriate
places :-)

Cheers
Richard

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