RE: Comments and questions

[Robert "J." Hansen <rjhansen@xxxxxxxx>]

> Sure: Control-P, print it and retype it.  The task could probably be

Well, no--you can actually do far worse.  The "signature" mechanism
takes its timestamp from the clock on your own home PC.  The problem is,
that clock isn't verified and isn't trusted, which means the signature
is worthless.  Imagine that two people come to court, each accusing the
other of copyright infringement.  They each have identical PDFs, except
that one is dated a week before the other.

If they were real documents, then they could be notarized by a notary
public and there would be some sort of trust the court could place in
one party's claim to have written it on such-and-such a date, etc.
That's because a notary is a trusted third party.  But if there's no
trusted third party, timestamp verification is a tremendously thorny
problem.

> How much protection is needed for the material?  We're talking game

Note that I'm not the one who thinks protection is needed for the
material.  Jeff Pawlowski is the one who's saying that the material he's
hosting is available in PDF format because it gives the author security
and control over the author's creation.  I'm just pointing out that the
PDF format neither gives security nor control, and if those two are
priorities, then they should be made in some format *other* than PDF.