Have you ever considered the financial value of your PDF documents?
This may seem like a strange question on its face however take a few moments to really think about it.
Once you have answered that question, ask yourself how much your business is losing because your PDF documents are not properly protected.
If any of your business's intellectual property (IP) is held in PDF documents, it is imperative, now more than ever, to make sure that they are protected and that they cannot be easily copied and shared.
Let’s look at an example.
A lot of businesses that offer training courses have to make sure that their IP, the training materials, are protected in order to continue successfully recruit students.
Prior to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, this was easily achieved with in person classes where the learning materials were handed out at the beginning of the course and then collected at the end.
The world has now changed to where a lot of training is forced to occur online and training institutions have to send the training material to students as PDF documents. If these materials are not protected from printing, copying and sharing, some students will easily make copies of the material and share with their friends, or even publicly (using Dropbox, Google Drive etc) across the world.
Other professionals such as architects, designers, copywriters, artists and more have been similarly affected.
The obvious solution to this problem is to encrypt the PDF document with an owner password to prevent printing and content copying. This unfortunately is not enough as some PDF readers do not obey these restrictions. This also doesn't resolve the problem of limiting access to the PDF to a period of time or geographic location(s).
Using All-About-PDF DRM to restrict a PDF to a list of allowed countries
This is where All-About-PDF's robust digital rights management (DRM*) platforms becomes invaluable. By using the software in your business you can do the following to control access to your intellectual property:
Add a static expiry date to your PDF: you can use All-About-PDF to specify when your PDF document is valid until. In the above example of a training institution, this can be at the end of the training course
Add a relative expiry date to your PDF: sometimes a static expiry date may not be practical as training courses may be started on different dates for different students. For this scenario, All-About-PDF allows you to set a PDF to expire so many days after it is first opened.
Restrict your PDF to certain countries: it is no secret that some countries treat IP and copyright laws with more respect than others. If you know that your PDF should only be accessible in certain countries, you can use All-About-PDF to restrict the countries from which the PDF can be opened.
Restrict your PDF to a list of allowed IP Addresses: similar to the above concept, you can also restrict the IP addresses from which a PDF can be viewed. If you need to keep information in your PDF documents inside your organization, you can add just your IP address to the allowed list.
Remotely kill a PDF: this useful feature allows to invalidate all copies of your PDF document remotely. Once invoked, the PDF documents become invalid and can no longer be opened or viewed.
As you can see, All-About-PDF’s DRM platform puts the control and security of your PDF documents, and more importantly, the value of your intellectual property back in your hands where it belongs! To get started, download All-About-PDF today!