> Here's the thing: I would like to publish a monthly emagazine in PDF > format and charge a small amount for each issue, but i want to set a > password for it or some other mechanism of the sort in order to > prevent anyone from just copying it and giving it away for free, > wasting all the work i've done. Is this so bad?
It is, as making artificial restrictions of user's freedom. There are ways to get money from useful work like writing an emagazine, for example accepting donations and publishing the next issue more quickly if enough money is collected. (Wouldn't consider people reading my text "wasting all the work", the word I use for it is "success".) > You > can't say that with libre software people have freedom and that the > software users are in control and then restrict what the users can do > with the software. Freedom is not being controlled by others, it's not a freedom to control what others can do. See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html for a longer explanation of this difference. > You may argue that this doesn't contribute to society or that it may > even be harmful to it, but take teachers as an example: the work they > do is beneficial to society - should they work for free? Teachers I know teach students (although not all call it teaching and I sometimes need years to realize that they taught me). They spend real time and real work to share knowledge with other people and help them understand it. They don't get paid for forbidding the students to help others. > LibreOffice3 Writer gives its users the option to export documents in > PDF format and set restrictions to the use of that document (disable > print, content copy, modifications,...) but those options aren't > enforced. If those options aren't going to be applied why give them in > the first place? I'd say this is fooling its users. It's a good argument against password protection which can be easily broken by users knowing the password and sharing it with the document. Every DRM is like this, only rubber-hose cryptography like DMCA-style laws might be effective. > In the previous given example about LibreOffice the developers are in > control - not the users. You might as well ban encryption altogether > or even passwords for log ins. Encryption and passwords can be and often are used to protect its users.
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