[DIYbio] legality of distributing pdfs or hard copy papers?

[Bryan Bishop]

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 11:34 AM, Bryce Lynch wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:29 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote:
>> Honestly, if you are worried about a publisher tracking you down for
>> partaking in science, then I would (with bias) recommend pdfparanoia
>> to strip out watermarks:
>> https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia
>
> I find the Metadata Anonymization Toolkit useful for similar things:

Hm, it says:

"Mat only removes metadata from your files, it does not anonymise
their content, nor handle watermarking, steganography  [...]"

As far as I can tell (from HTTP server logs), businesses looking for
"science violations" are searching by looking for the watermark
strings, not the metadata in the pdf's headers.

Here's some ip addresses you should block:
http://diyhpl.us/wiki/users/superkuh/sdf

But if we need to start stripping journal names, paper titles, author
names, etc., from pdfs, I am not sure how we would re-assemble that
information later, because anyone would be able to re-assemble that
information and would to find the "science violators".

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
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