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<snip> "...She is super-concerned about competitors stealing this
manual - apparently she has had to take legal action 10 times in the
past 5 years against competitors who have used copyrighted material
from her site..."
********************************
Tanja,
I've been faced with this issue many times and your client will have to
decide the balance between security and accessibility. The more secure
a document becomes, the less accessible it is to anyone.
Megan Golding's comment about a password protected section of the site
sounds like your best bet. At least then you have some control over who
can access the information.
You can lock up the PDFs with the security options, like you said, so
that all the user can do is view the file. Also, put the locked PDFs
behind the password protected section. This is your cheapest solution.
There are third party plug-ins for Acrobat available that can add
additional security and authorization features to PDFs. You can find
info about most of them on the Web. They add security, but they also
limit accessibility. Not to mention that the cost of some of these
plug-ins can be a bit pricy.
If someone can read it, they can copy it. Place a clear copyright mark
on your work (maybe even put it in the footer of every page), lock it
up tight if it's a PDF, put a disclosure statement upfront that
announces the proprietary content and warns of penalties, and hope for
the best. In a situation like this, all you can do is document your
work and sue the person who infringes your copyright.
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