GICLEE PRINTING- LIMIT TOTAL PRINTS ALLOWED

In short, no.

With normal password protection, and even using LiveCycle DRM, a PDF is either printable or not, you cannot control quantities. Also, most printers refuse a PDF that has any type of security assigned to it, as the security also prevents their printer software from breaking apart the document or arranging pages on a larger sheet.

If the artwork is your copyright then your 'protection' against unauthorized copies is simply the law - you can sue, the printer knows you can sue, and hopefully they're a business with enough to lose that they won't risk landing in court over a few dollars in profit. Ensure you have a written contract with them specifying exactly how many copies you're permitting them to make, and what they should do with any rejects, tests and the PDF itself once the job is finished.

great feedback. thankyou. my concern is an unscrupulous employee can email the PDF freely to another part of the world and they can be printing on everything from tshirts to tombstones.

Thats the difficult part, I hope Adobe can create something to address this down the line in terms of a locking code to lock the PDF to a users computer, if the user forwards the PDF onto another computer on the other side of the globe, it can only be opened with a password generated from a server, the server is where I login online to verify the users details (purchase receipt, name) and generate from within my login an access code or pin which is emailed to that user. Once that pin is entered they can read it only from that workstation, but obviously also a limited printing cycle built into PDF would be most useful.

Other options could be built in, such as requiring a new password everytime its opened, or after 3 views, or unlimited. Or even view the first 5 pages but password required after that point. regardless this pin or code is locked to that computers system either the processor or other unique identifier of that PC.

ebookgold runs a similiar service that works very well however I want it specifically for my PDF to restrict active usage and printing. Hopefully development goes in this direction, with Adobe`s creative power and global reach they would be well placed to develop this as an online service to make your digital assets controllable.

In terms of 'locking' a PDF to a particular user, we can do that already using LiveCycle Rights Management - a secured PDF can be digitally connected to a user's Adobe ID via their password and email address, but it doesn't control which computer they use, only that their credentials are entered each time the file is opened. LC will track events so you can see who opened the PDF and when, but you cannot control print quantities as that's part of the operating system. Of course once a document is printed, rights management ceases to be the issue as they can scan it back in and do what they want with the resulting image; but that's the nature of documents.

If Adobe implemented a 'print X copies' limit, then all you'd have to do is set the copy spinner in your printer dialog box to 100, and 100 copies you will get. Nothing can be done within Acrobat to interfere with the operating system; not only on a practical level but in many countries doing so is illegal. You can also print one and photocopy it 99 times - so the concept of limits just doesn't exist.

You can trial LCRM free until the end of the year via Adobe Document Center - http://dc.adobe.com - however as I said before, printers will almost always refuse to accept a secured file, and because it's a trial both you and your recipients have to sign up to the service before it works - the DC version of an Adobe ID isn't the same as your normal one.

LiveCycle looks great, they enter the DC adobe ID and email, can I see if they are doing this from a different computer or IP address? And do I monitor this by logging into an Adobe website or from my own computer via the LC software and internet connection?

Regards the Adobe PDF security, what has been implemented into the PDF that the customer receives so that hackers cannot break the ID entry stage or other methods?

In this case I would be incorporating animations, video and music, not just text so screen capture wouldn`t do them any good for quality reproduction they would need to hack it to the bones. So security of access and editing of the digital asset is my main concern with the PDF itself..any feedback on this..

In Document Center you can only see the email address, date and time of an 'event' on a tracked file, and what that event was (open, print, copy content, etc.) - for some it will show the duration, but you can't see their IP address or actions on a per-page level, like if they clicked a link or played a video.

Document Center audits are displayed within the DC web application - you must log in to see them. The simplest way to play with it is to create a second account, tag a file using the built-in "audit usage" policy, and open it using the other email address. When you log back in to DC, hover on the filename to see a popup window, and pick the "view document details" icon.

In theory you could sit there and watch the screen, revoking access when three 'print' events appear, but of course as I've said that's impractical as you can't see how many copies they're making each time, and you can't script the DC interface to do stuff like that automatically.

In terms of the possible holes in security of an LCRM PDF, it's not something we tend to discuss in detail; however we can say that only Adobe products can connect to the LC servers and correctly identify themselves, so the person opening the PDF has to be using Reader or Acrobat to gain authenticated access. As both products fully respect the LC security policy, you cannot break the security from within them no matter what you try and do.

Using Non-Adobe software, a file with 'open' permissions revoked (which is what an LCRM file is) will not open trivially, nor can you remove the security trivially as you can with the simple password-protected 'do not print' option. LCDRM wraps the PDF inside an encrypted object that isn't part of the published PDF specification, which is why you end up with an 'envelope' style document, and why non-Adobe software can't open them.

The commercial products available which can break open password-protected files do not work on LCDRM files, however if the file is opened by a legitimate user and can be viewed on screen, some or all of that content may be extractable by a determined expert hacker.

Thanks UVSAR, all excellent clear responses, and very much appreciated.