Re: Prevent copying

I agree with you that it is ultimately impossible to stop someone, they
could just use a camera, or even just write out a copy of the document.
However this question has come up here before and I have been wondering
how difficult it can be made for someone to copy a document.

Clearly there is a grey area here and some people want to stop as much
copying as they can. If this was not true then they would not be
selling programs which make web pages unable to be saved. So there is a
need for some counter measures.

So as a possible scenario. A document might only be viewed on terminal
server, and that could be set to allow no new program installations. So
that stops screen capture software unless it is possible to use it on a
client computer and take a screen capture of the remote desktop window.
Here though on a network group policy mght prevent new program
installations as well, so terminal server might not be necessary. Also
HTML editors could be prevented from being installed, though Microsoft
Word might work as one anyway. This could be solved by making the
terminal server not have a word processor installed on it.

Group policy could also turn off "save image as ..." in a web browser
so they could not get the images. Temp folders for the browser might be
denied access with group policy. The folder in which the web pages were
placed might not be allowed to show folder contents so a user might be
restricted to clicking on links instead of copying and pasting a file
from the folder.

Also a document with images and a lot of formatting would not come out
well in a photograph so if the intent is to stop an exact duplicate
being made then this might be successful. A PDF file also (I think) can
deny access to copying and pasting from it. I can see a system like
this might be useful in a law firm.

Another way would be to show the document as an image file such as a
JPEG, and then secure the image viewer program.

There may well be ways to get around all of this though.





Robert Moir wrote:
Greg O wrote:
It might be possible to have the documents in the folder as http web
pages. Some of those have code which makes them much harder to copy.
For example you might view them in a browser but cannot save it. Some
of them you can't even save as a text file. Someone could still do a
screen capture or open the page in a HTML editor and save it though.
If you only want to stop casual copying this might be enough though.

I understand what you're saying but if that solution is actually acceptable
to anyone, then they are not actually concerned about document security. It
might just stop someone copying a document by accident but it's extremely
trivial to defeat that if you want to copy the document.

I actually wrote something about this in march last year that kinda
illustrates how I feel about the whole subject...
A picture's worth a thousand words though -
http://www.robertmoir.co.uk/images/Paranoid.jpg


--
Robert Moir

www.robertmoir.com

.

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