Marco d'Itri wrote: > On May 31, Sune Vuorela <s...@vuorela.dk> wrote: > >> So. you want Okular to by default help you with violating conditions of use >> of >> the document you downloaded? > Correct, this is what I would like it to do (but I use evince instead, > which by default does not bother users with this sillyness). > Users can still legally have rights even if they are forbidden by > license terms which are effectively void. > DRM deprives users of such rights.
While completely agreeing with you, Marco, I would like to add a couple of points. First off, this is just a flag, and is not really DRM in the sense we normally understand it: some sort of encryption, etc. It is easier to write a PDF viewer that does not honor the flag than to write one that does, since there is no decryption or anything needed. Honoring the flag is an optional "feature", not a prerequisite. The other point is that the flag has nothing to do with the law. I can perfectly well set a flag on a PDF that I generate for myself, and that doesn't make it illegal to copy text out of the PDF I generate for myself. Similarly, just because someone sets the flag on a PDF they give me, doesn't make it illegal to copy text from that PDF. Copyright law, at least in the USA, provides "fair use" rights to copy and distribute small portions of a work. Being able to cut and paste just makes that process slightly faster. And copyright law does not prevent you from copying the entire thing, if you keep the result to yourself. As, of course, cp and the KDE file manager can do (just keeping it in the same format). If it is illegal to do something with the document, that is orthogonal to whether Okular obeys this flag by default, in my mind. Okular is run by the Debian user. As our social contract states, "Our priorities are our users and Free Software." We can, and should, take the high road on this and make sure our users have maximum functionality by default. -- John -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-qt-kde-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
