downloadable pdf licensing

[icemancast]

i am making a product to purchase and download (pdf) i have seen where they license the pdf and the actual pdf has my name inside of it that it was licensed to me. how can i achieve this.

[PHP_Chimp]

You can use php to create the pdf for you, then you can add whatever information you want into the document before it is created.

Have a look at [uk.php.net...]

[icemancast]

i looked a little into this and it to have the pdflib on your server you have to pay a license fee about $1000.00 is there any other hosted options that i can do?

[icemancast]

is imagemagik an option?

[PHP_Chimp]

If you do a search on the web there are a few other free options that you can use to get pdf's made through php. I dont know anything about any of the other options, but they say they are free and do a smiliar job.

[icemancast]

let me ask the question in a different way:

what is the best way to license a pdf that someone downloaded to that person? just curious.

[PHP_Chimp]

There is not really any format that people cant edit. PDF's can be edited even if you have 'locked' then, jpegs, tiff, gif or other images can all be edited. So there is no way that you can stop a person editing there details out of a document.

Image editing is the easiest and I dont know many people that dont have an image editing program.
PDF's are a little more secure, as there seem to be less people that can edit them.
So unless you want to go down the rout of encrypting the contents and making people purchase a pass key to access the product I am guessing the PDF is a good format.

As with everything you need to decide on how much money you are going to loose by people copying there documents and sending them to other people. Then decide how much time/money you are prepared to spend on stopping them.
If you charge millions for 1 document then spending a few hundred thousand on an encryption system that would foil most governments is not so bad, if each document costs £1 then something that the average person cant edit should be fine.

Maybe other have some ideas about good formats, that the average person cant edit, or ways of stopping people editing more usual formats.

[edited by: PHP_Chimp at 6:58 pm (utc) on Oct. 19, 2007]