ldopa.net

True story: I used to work at a big, dreary Western Massachusetts publishing company, and after a couple years, I was laid off, because the company was — and presumably still is — losing money hand over fist. They were (and presumably still are) having trouble competing as an information provider in the age of Google. I remember during my time there, the executive staff spent a lot of time fretting and ruminating about the idea of “protected PDFs”. Their idea was that they could send out these magic protected PDFs, and only the people they wanted to be able to print the PDF would be able to print them. Their biggest fear was the office copier — and it’s not an entirely irrational or unreasonable fear, as the picture I took above proves that this does, in fact, happen. Schools are some cheap bastards.

Now, aside from the fact that PDF’s aren’t very secure, the very idea itself of “protected information” strikes me as inherently flawed. Information, they say, wants to be free, and the print industry is having a real hard time with this. The print industry knows paper and ink, and little else. If you work in the print industry, my three pieces of advice are:

• Stop thinking if you just protect your product the right way, no one will steal it, because no matter what you do: people will steal it. People will steal it with copiers and scanners and digital cameras. People will steal it with pencils and index cards. There is an army of well-organized, collaborative folks waiting to open up your information, and only one of them has to be able to do it for you to lose.
• Open up your information, or open some rich subset of your information — and get it indexed by Google and everybody else, as soon as you can. Far worse than having your information copied here and there is having your information unavailable or unknown to your customers.
• Start thinking about how you can start a dialog with your users and customers. Get them involved in your products, give them a stake, and start an actual community around your products — because in the very near future, that community will be your product.

~jeff