Step 2: Dow Jones starts changing random whitespace in the text, in an attempt to "tag" the text untraceably to trace which subscriber is leaking the information. They cancel my subscription.
They don't just cancel your subscription. They sue your butt into next week. You can make it harder for them to find you, but if you're eating into their profits, they will, and the more effort you've made them go through, the madder they'll be, and the harder their lawyers will bite. There's no way to "tag" a document in such a way that the tag cannot be removed. At worst, I read the document out loud, and have my partner rekey it, while rewriting it slightly. Unless it's something like poetry which you can't just rewrite, this will pretty much sanitize the data against any kind of keying. The fact is, people copy music and software now. It Happens, and as much as they wish it didn't, it does. And when things become more electronic, it will still happen. My guess is that unless such duplication becomes institutionalized, it's not worth the effort to do anything about it. And if you start buying things, copying them, and giving or selling them to lots of other people in an organized way, the real owners will find you. Marc