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submitted 10 months ago by sebinspace@lemmy.world 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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[-] Atropos@lemmy.world 16 points 10 months ago

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

[-] sebinspace@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

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

[-] danielquinn@lemmy.ca 16 points 10 months ago

The easiest way to confirm this would be:

Find out how to list the metadata from a PDF.
List the metadata from a known-to-have-stuff-you-don't-want PDF.
"Print" the new PDF from the old one
List the metadata from the new PDF.

[-] Timwi@kbin.social 19 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] sebinspace@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

This, essentially. Like until I tried to move music from iTunes to Foobar, I didn’t learn that metadata was even a thing, and apparently neither does Apple.