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Message: <blockquote data-quote="f33b" data-source="post: 4745932" data-attributes="member: 61141">Thanks for the docs, interesting read. Does section V1, 1 ("Prayer for Relief") have anything to do with the PDF taken down? Is DriveThruRPG/OBS a person "in active concert or participation" with the named defendants? Also, regarding the pixel wide watermark, I'm not an expert, but I do work in a company that produces print and ebook quality PDFs (honestly, I work in a different department), but running some kind of diff against two or more pdfs isn't as not trivial as some posters make it sound. Remember, PDFs arose out of Postscript languange, these aren't flat image files like jpgs or gifs. Much of the content is encapsulated as vector graphics. Even if the micro water mark is an embedded raster image, you would probably have to parse the underlying Postscript code to identify the stream containing the image data. Removing this data will, in all probability, break the PDF (make it unreadable to readers, corrupt the data.)edit: to clarify, (or not) it is conceivable that the micro watermark is a one pixel wide, transparent image object that is present in the pdf as a transparency, and is placed over or behind a larger image on the page. You could harvest the text out the PDF, but would be left with a flat text file, and most likely would have issues with text being lost due to unsupported fonts and crazy formatting to boot. If we look at the complaints, only three defendants were actually identified as buying the PDFs, the others, including the three John Does, "just" redistributed the watermarked PDFs (obviously, the meat of the complaint). I think WoTC showed their hand too soon on this one, better if they had waited and identified more individuals involved with the initial purchase and infringing event, so to cast a bigger net. Of course, letting it be known that there is a watermark which 99.99% of all users will not be able to see, find or do anything about should do something to curb (but not suppress, people do have scanners after all) pirating.WoTC could also look into using something like Microsoft Reader, which is a pretty heavily DRM'd eBook platform, but I doubt that would be widely popular, as the most secure form of Microsoft Reader requires users to have a Microsoft Passport account.</blockquote>

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