Howto disable pdf drm policy

In this article I'm going to show you how to disable drm policy in pdf files. In my opinion drm functional restrictions are resticting my rights on e-books I bought. Because of those restrictions I can't print my e-books, I can't copy text in e-books and I can't make any annotations. All things I can do with my paper book. If the price of e-books were at most half of the full price, I would agree to buy a cripple e-book version. Unfortunately e-books have most of the time the same price as the paper version or the price is even higher! Just saying that from the buyers view drm restrictions are harming my buyer rights.

Remark: the method I'll show you here, won't crack passwords of password protected fpdf files!

Howto get rid of the DRM restrictions?

On the internet there are several website providing a service to get rid of the drm restictions from PDF files. These websites have all a filesize restiction of 3 or 5 megabytes. Most e-books are much bigger than that, so the service is not always working. Lukely the opensource tool QPDF is here to the rescue. For the major platforms (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) is a version available. Look for the latest version in the directory/folder contrib. You can find there a Windows Executable with the name qpdf_vc6.exe . This is a tarball and you can untar it with i.e. Tugzip or 7-zip. Place qpdf_vc6.exe in a good accessible folder where you can easily use the command prompt and you can place your drm e-books. Use the Windows Powertoy Open Command Windows Here to quickly open a command prompt in any folder.

On Mac OS X an Linux you have to compile the source code.

You will use qpdf_vc6.exe with the following command line arguments: qpdf_vc6.exe --decrypt filename_drm_pdf filename_without_drm_pdf Look closely for the spaces between the input and output files. Warning: don't use the same filename as output filename as the input filename. You will overwrite your payed e-book with an empty e-book!

For Windows users the above howto might be ovewhelmin, so I made a simple user interface on top of qpdf. QPDF has an artistic license an my GUI is just a little addon.

PDF Freedom download

PDFreedom versie 0.1 can be downloaded here. Before use please check the MD5- and SHA hashes!
MD5 hash: ACD7BE6B13A7D4768A583E927154CACE
SHA hash: 86B5E44367F13CDD4DE96C4BF84B47F57145E85F