In this article we look at how and if website protection software can be used to copy protect PDF that is displayed online from web pages. But unfortunately, no website protection solution will protect PDF on its own. The reason for that is unless the PDF is encrypted so that it is not readable by Adobe Reader resources, it cannot be protected at all, not while Adobe Reader provides a toolbar that cannot be constrained or customized to remove save, copy and print buttons. Consequently it does not matter how effective or how powerful the website protection is because those options will always be available. The only way to remove those save, copy and print options is by using  proprietary PDF software and reader and by the time that you have done that, website protection may no longer be necessary, at least for your PDF media.


Other media such as text, images and video can all be most securely copy protected by using a website protection software, especially the ArtistScope Site Protection System (ASPS), which provides the most secure protection from absolutely all avenues and methods of copy and save. ASPS uses a server side filter to deliver encrypted web pages to the ArtisBrowser, a specially designed web browser that prevents exploit of web media. When an ASPS page is on display in the ArtisBrowser, the user cannot save, copy or print anything unless specifically allowed by the website owner who can control those rights per page by setting meta-tags in page headers. Images and video cannot be downloaded and saved and they cannot be screen recorded. Nor can the user look in page source for the location of those media resources.

With ASPS media cannot be extracted from browser cache or memory, which are a commonly used avenues of exploit employed by media down loaders and recorders. In fact the secure tunnel created between ASPS server and the ArtisBrowser cannot be exploited to retrieve media links even by using packet sniffing software. But with PDF more drastic measures are required by encrypting the PDF files themselves. However finding a PDF encryption solution to copy protect PDF that can be displayed online has some limitations because there is only one PDF software that can do that which is the CopySafe PDF Protection solution.

Now while ASPS and CopySafe PDF are most compatible and both fully supported in the ArtisBrowser, why use two copy protection solutions on your web site. Ok, so you may already have PDF documents already made and now just need a way to protect them? 
If so, then why display them online when distributing for desktop reading can be much more secure when DRM is applied, and CopySafe PDF does provide the best protection in both scenarios, but why not consider publishing that PDF content as web pages?