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Publishing (Keeping Rights of Ownership)

Avatar Rick Churchill
Some time ago I published a booklet on the Apple store. It was a guide to using a camera called "Fujifilm XT-20 Tips" and I made it free to download. It is not very popular because I don't have many outlets where I can advertise it but I have used it to answer some questions on the Fuji forums.

From one of these forums I have been asked if I could publish a pdf version as the subscriber has no access to an Apple product. Apart from stating in the booklet “Copyright remains with myself, Rick Churchill and therefore copying of this material for sale in any form is strictly prohibited” I believe I have little control of the document so, would I be giving up any control of the document if I were to send a pdf copy to the forum, assuming I could?

Re: Publishing (Keeping Rights of Ownership)

Avatar Mick Burrell
Most people seem to want everything to be free these days with no regard to the time and effort taken to produce software, books etc. However, you're quite right (I think) about your copyright prohibiting distribution for profit but if you put a pdf out there, you'd have no control over how many times it's passed on and no way of finding out. A very, very slim chance if someone is selling it but no hope if they're not.

Re: Publishing (Keeping Rights of Ownership)

Avatar Rick Churchill
I have found that the iBooks Author export menu allows me, when making a pdf, the options of putting "Opening" under a password and also "Printing" &/or "Copying parts of the document" under a separate password so I am thinking that I may allow the document to be opened only.

This all assumes the forum allows attachments.

Re: Publishing (Keeping Rights of Ownership)

Avatar Tony Still
When you write a document, you automatically gain copyright over it. Anyone who distributes it without your permission is breaking the law. This may be of limited comfort to you.

I *think* books from the Apple Books store have DRM (as iTunes tracks did for a number of years). Apple has the advantage that their distribution system allows them to 'lock' a document to an Apple ID (I think they use a cryptographic protection tied to the ID); this requires support from the playing/reading app so is probably impractical for you to use. Any simple encryption fails because you have to supply the key...

PDF has various limitations that can be applied to a document (no printing, for example) but that too requires support from the reader application. I understand that many third-party PDF readers do not enforce these settings.

You're probably best to rely on the honesty of the person you sen it to, backed up by an exhortation not to steal it.

Re: Publishing (Keeping Rights of Ownership)

Avatar Rick Churchill
Thanks Tony. I had intended to send a pdf document but as I suspected, the forum restricts it's attachments to less than 1Mbytes so I cannot do it that way.
I would send a link but I have recently deleted my Dropbox app (and it's many tentacles into the Mac OS) as I use Mail Drop to send large files to my friends and Dropbox recently reduced its free storage from 5Gbytes to 2Gbytes.
I don't know an Apple way of providing a link to a file hosted somewhere. I looked briefly but only found sharing with others on a network. I'll not resurrect Dropbox just for this purpose.
(He'll have to buy a Mac or send me his email address!)

Re: Publishing (Keeping Rights of Ownership)

Avatar Mick Burrell
if you do have an email address, you can still use Mail Drop. If the recipient doesn't have a Mac, they get a link to download it.

Re: Publishing (Keeping Rights of Ownership)

Avatar Tony Still
You can share a file (or a folder now) from iCloud but I fancy the recipient needs an Apple ID, and perhaps an Apple device, to read it.

I use Dropbox but via its web interface. My experience (a while ago) was that it still worked after I had denied most of the permissions it requested. I too disliked the way it tried to embed itself - just another attack vector!

Otherwise, can you reduce the size of the PDF (presumably by reducing image quality) or just send an extract. Preview can do extracts very simply; you probably need the originating software to reduce image quality.

Re: Publishing (Keeping Rights of Ownership)

Avatar Rick Churchill
Yes, I think I stopped researching the iCloud route when I learned that you would need an Apple ID. I didn’t now how to store a single file or folder in the cloud (and I certainly do not want to store the complete 727Gbytes)

That’s interesting about Dropbox on the web, I may try it.

I tried compressing the pdf file but it saved only 0.1 of a Mbyte. I haven’t tried to reduce it in any other way
 
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