Chapter 25. Understanding Digital Rights Management

IN THIS CHAPTER

  • Getting familiar with Digital Rights Management

  • Adding security to documents

  • Securing documents with file attachments

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a term used to describe protecting intellectual property against unauthorized viewing, editing, reproduction, and/or distribution. When using a creative-design workflow, you may want to restrict document viewing to selected individuals; or you may want to share design concepts with clients so they can view your designs, although you don't want the documents printed or edited.

Most of the CS programs offer you a vehicle for protecting documents via export to PDF. Document security is applied to PDF files and not directly in the CS application documents. Therefore, you first need to know how to generate a PDF from the other CS applications and then apply security either at the time of PDF creation or from within Acrobat. In this chapter, you learn how to export CS application documents to PDF and secure the files against unauthorized viewing, editing, and printing.

Understanding Document Security

Securing documents created with CS applications means you ultimately get a document to PDF and apply Acrobat security either at the time of exporting a file to PDF or later, after you open a PDF in Acrobat. In either case, Acrobat security is used.

Methods of security available in Acrobat include two primary types of encryption. You can secure a file against opening and editing by ...

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