Okay, so my company sells proprietary training materials/books worldwide to corporations and training companies. We print and ship hard copy materials from a logistics/printing company with locations in the U.S., UK, Canada, and Australia. All of our titles are kept in pdf format by this company and printed/shipped when we get an order.

I've got a huge customer in Moscow that would like to order 50 books-about 600 pages each. To ship them from the UK to Russia will cost about $600.00 and they may get hung up in customs for days or weeks.

So, if I provide this customer with a printable pdf, can I somehow limit the amount of times it is printed (like a license of some sorts)? I would like to email a password protected pdf to the customer and have them print it themselves. Thing is, I don't want them to pay for 50 and print 100. The customer owns a large printing facility so they have the capability to print as many as they like.

Is this something that can be done? I don't mind shipping them but the materials are for classes that have specific dates and customs sucks there.

I should add that these are not my materials-they have been written by others and I resell them. The average price is $200/book. So there are some major copyright issues I could face if the authors found out the Moscow company was printing more books than they ordered.

[Edited on April 23, 2008 at 3:27 PM. Reason : d]

4/23/2008 3:24:04 PM

why does it matter if they print 100 and pay for 50?




they don't have photocopiers in Russia?

im saying they could've paid for 1 and photocopied 1094832094, if they were scheming to being with.


If you're already on the honor system, you may as well stay on it.



You're better off trying to digitally mark them for that specific company and then protect it, so if they start showing up elsewhere, you can get legal on their asses.


[Edited on April 23, 2008 at 3:29 PM. Reason : but even restrictions can be stripped from a pdf file.]

4/23/2008 3:26:37 PM

^^I added the last line
^ I have a minimum order of 50 of each title for that reason

[Edited on April 23, 2008 at 3:28 PM. Reason : s]

4/23/2008 3:27:44 PM

not possible afaik

4/23/2008 3:29:21 PM

that's not on your back though


just give them the standard copyright infringement jargon, protect the files, and if they start going nuts, they'll catch a lawsuit




and btw, i dont think you can limit the number of prints on a pdf

4/23/2008 3:32:26 PM

but it's russia - the country that got away with allofmp3.com forever lol

they don't give a damn about your us lawsuits

4/23/2008 3:33:19 PM

That's what I was thinking. I don't have the time to go to Moscow or deal with them if something goes bad. I'm thinking I'll just try sell them a license for the pdf file and work out a plan on royalties with the authors.

4/23/2008 3:36:10 PM

by the time you get them to agree on all that, you could have shipped the books and gotten them bribed through customs

4/23/2008 3:37:02 PM

I'd just send a disclaimer with a nice big empty threat that if they make a ton of copies, you'll file suit



and then pray you don't find that shit on demonoid next week.

4/23/2008 3:40:22 PM

rofl

i'd tell them they should have thought of ordering your book earlier. you'll ship it and they can deal with customs over there by bribing whoever they need to in order to get them reviewed and cleared by the communist propaganda clearance and review house

[Edited on April 23, 2008 at 3:43 PM. Reason : .]

4/23/2008 3:43:05 PM

http://www.oracle.com/products/middleware/content-management/information-rights-management.html

this does work

but like any technology, there will always be ways around it. this makes it fairly hard though.

4/23/2008 4:23:28 PM

Haha, after 15 minutes on the phone with Oracle they still can't figure out if they can put a limit on the number printed or if I can see how many times it was printed.. I had two people on a conference call.

Doesn't really matter though, they could still tell me they needed 50, print those, and make 50 copies I suppose. Dammit.

[Edited on April 23, 2008 at 5:04 PM. Reason : s]

4/23/2008 4:55:59 PM

What would stop them from using a program like CutePDF to print the PDF to another PDF. The second PDF wouldn't have any protection on it.

4/23/2008 5:43:07 PM

http://www.pdf2exe.com/pdf2exe_pro.html

First link when googling

4/23/2008 5:45:11 PM

rofl but graniteballs is right - if they can print a copy there, they can make infinite copies of it as they wish...

4/23/2008 6:38:39 PM

is it possible to prevent anything from being copied? i mean other than threaten with lawsuits?

4/23/2008 10:09:13 PM

Quote :

"What would stop them from using a program like CutePDF to print the PDF to another PDF. The second PDF wouldn't have any protection on it."

the oracle sealedmedia app checks the name of the printer driver and port you're using against a list of PDF/file printers, it also won't let you print to a raw postscript file.

4/23/2008 10:34:52 PM

Quote :

"Haha, after 15 minutes on the phone with Oracle they still can't figure out if they can put a limit on the number printed or if I can see how many times it was printed.. I had two people on a conference call."

i know we've done something like this before...

if nothing else, you can have it destroy itself after a certain period of time, or you can revoke the license server-side.

i'd say give them a reasonable amount of time to print the 50 copies (say a day or two) and then deactivate it, that's about as good as you're going to get.

4/23/2008 10:36:30 PM

Didn't read the replies but it sounds like your best option is to send them printed media and have them eat the shipping costs.

If you give them a file they could print 100 instead of 50 like you said. They could also give others the file. Best to keep the electronic copy out of the transaction, unless you don't mind it spreading all over the place.

4/23/2008 10:51:24 PM