

Anything you view in a browser is downloaded to a temporary folder on your disk and loaded into the browser from there. This is why the internet uses caching or PDF (and any other) documents use downloads and work with local copies.

Searching a document for a given word suddenly becomes unbelievably slow, and everything comes to a halt if you meet a picture or want some fancy font rendering. Of course, working that way does create serious performance problems.

Not very usable, you might say, but it does minimize caching (just an up-scale version of downloading). You could handcraft an application to receive information from a server a line at a time for both printing and displaying text. Stopping the downloading of files is theoretically possible. When it comes to it, the result is the same – no misuse. It doesn’t stop them from making copies – but it DOES prevent copies from being useful to anybody who is not authorized. You can then control who can actually use the file and what they can do with it. The answer is simple – you must encrypt the file and make sure that the application that can decrypt it cannot be used to make an unprotected, uncontrollable version. So, if it is impractical to stop file copying (ask the film industry about this one) what can you do? There are just too many ways to copy files and admins would require too much control over the OS. You have similar problems with trying to stop people saving files once they have opened them with an application. An attempt to modify the MP-3 standard also failed because it proved unworkable.ĭespite what people say or think, unless hardware is involved, it is not practically possible to stop people from making copies of files, one way or another. The most successful approaches were probably the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) standard (it failed because the public would not buy a product that did not allow them to copy their own tapes). MYTH 1: You can stop the copying of filesīack in the eighties, particularly with the advent of CD-ROM devices, a lot of work was done to try to implement systems that prevented the copying of films and soundtracks. What you can stop, however, is the use of content by unlicensed users. It is a common myth that you can stop the copying, emailing, and downloading of files. Stop copying, saving, emailing & downloading files
