How to Protect Your PDF Materials From Getting Pirated?

Are you involved in training activities and prepare training course material for your target users? If so then you would know the amount of effort that goes into developing training course documents. So, would you not want to distribute the documents exclusively to people who purchase them online or attend your classroom training programs (if you conduct any)? Of course, you would.

But, as is the case with most electronic documents, your e-learning or training course material is always under threat of piracy. There will always be people who would want to access such exclusive documents without paying for them and who would try illegal copying techniques to do so. Also, an authorized user could help such people gain access without your consent. And, once any training document gets leaked to an unauthorized user, it becomes extremely difficult to control its proliferation to more unauthorized users.

 

So, you need to take precautionary actions and the best way to do so is by controlling the documents’ usage. A Digital Rights Management (DRM) solution can help you safeguard your training materials as it ensures only authorized users to have access to them and for the time period that you specify – one of DRM prominent functionalities allows you to set expiry dates for user access.

In this way, you can set your training documents to expire on a fixed date, after a particular number of days, after a specific number of user views or even after a number of prints. And, a document DRM solution empowers you to change these settings in the system at any time.  So, you can revoke access to any user almost instantly if you identify some unusual behaviour or misuse of your documents.

Training courses don’t have to be set to expire – you can even set the expiry date to “never”, which gives users lifetime access.  But, in such cases, it will not be possible to change the access dates later on.  So, for more flexibility, it is better to set a fixed date or duration (even if a long time in the future) for authorized user access expiry.

Suggested Read: Top 10 best PDF Editors for Linux.

There may also be times when the content in your training material becomes outdated.  In such cases, DRM security software allows you to revoke access to the document so users can only access new course material.  This is made possible by ensuring that your documents are accessible online at all times and unavailable for permanent offline access or by adding document expiry.

Additionally, a PDF DRM solution provides you with basic features to copy-protect your training documents, including allowing you to do the following:

• Prevent file saving, screen grabbing or copying and pasting of documents
• Track the number of views, prints, etc., done by authorized users
• Insert dynamic watermarks in all printed copies to link the users’ identities with the printouts to discourage users from photocopying and sharing course material with unauthorized users
• Lock PDF files to specific locations so they cannot be used say outside a training room
• Check the license of documents that are being opened by any user

All in all, using PDF DRM software is a highly secure way of preventing piracy of your training materials in PDF format.