Protect a .pdf

[Fabula]

Hi

My wife completed her PhD. about 8 years ago. Her supervisor has just asked for a digital copy, as she has been asked for help with some research into a similar area from a student at another university, and the hard copy would be a pain to photocopy (600 pages).

Wifey is happy to help. But would like to protect the document as much as possible before sending it over. Text ideally will be not copy and pasteable. I only have freeware apps to protect the file with.

Any advice?

[kalniel]

What are you trying to protect against? Other people accessing it in transfer? If so, encrypt it using something like 7z and use another method of communication to give the supervisor the password.

If you're worried about the supervisor copying it then don't send it. Or do, and threaten to sue if the copyright is breached. Your main defence is legal, not technological. But the university may own the copyright anyway so he/she may be within their rights anyway. Personally I think these things should be in the public domain - the more people that see it the harder it is to be plagiarised.

[peterb]

If it is plagiarism she is worried about, her PhD thesis is probably on most of the academic checkers like turnitin, so any non attributable copying would be detected by the assessor S.

I know academe can be ruthless and competitive, but I'd have thought that having your PhD thesis cited would be a good thing.

It is possible to protect PDF files cryptographically, but only afaik, only with the full (paid for) versions.

[herulach]

Not to mention that (assuming all unis operate the same as mine did) a hard copy will be in the library.

Most freeware doc to pdf converters will have a pdf image file built in, but its trivial to do ocr on it to convert back.