The organization I work for has recently determined that we have had a significant loss in revenue due to pirated or unlicensed copies of electronic books/publications that we sell. with the loss being so substantial we needed to find a work-around. It wasn’t realistic to eliminate electronic copies as they are much more profitable and in some cases desirable than their hard-copy equivalents.

We discussed DRM and it was decided that the implementation was too expensive and not restrictive enough as the restrictions we can place on PDF files require that the end-user have software that also recognized these protection restrictions.

We opted for a solution that allows us to continue to offer PDF formats, is the most cross-software friendly and least cumbersome on our customers. Here’s the solution we decided on:

First, I should let you know that we control our own servers so we have access to install the software that we deem necessary. We are running PHP as the Web Application Language. We installed software that allows us to append text above the content of the existing PDF. In the text we indicated that the document is only licensed for individual use and that re-distribution is not authorized. Since we sell these documents, we also have their billing information, so within the same statement, we place the purchasers name on the document.

This procedure is performed on every page of the electronic document, which makes it very cumbersome to remove should an individual decide they want to redistribute it. In addition, we can lock the document and provide license terms upon download to remind the customer of these terms.

Hopefully, this helps to address some of the electronic PDF document concerns with regard to DRM that are out there. There are various applications that provide support for webservers to modify/write to PDF documents. I have found this support for PHP and Coldfusion, although asp, aspx,ruby on rails and the like should also offer support.

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So as I’ve mentioned in many of my other posts, I’ve been using linux for the last couple of years. I’ve found that there are a number of editors available and everybody has their own preference. Ultimately, the best editor depends on what your goals are for the editor. It’s hard to get ahold of the complete package with an open-source solution. Especially, if you want something you can open and use immediately, without much of a tutorial.

I primarily use these editors for PHP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails, Javascript, SQL, HTML and CSS.

I have used the following editors, so I’ll cover my experiences with them briefly.

Let’s start off with an introduction. If you made it here, you most-likely already know who I am. With a previous employer, my responsibility was to manage various web projects; which includes, the project management, personnel management and the actual higher level programming required. I’m still in the industry, but no longer am employed by a web hosting firm. Enough about my past, please allow me to explain my experience.

I started out building projects using Coldfusion and picked up some fusebox along the way. Since I started in the industry, I’ve advanced my knowledge of coldfusion to include object oriented programming, in that case using Coldfusion Components. I also started using Javascript; including the prototype and scriptaculous libraries to integrate many advanced features, such as Edit in Place, AJAX, etc.

After a while, I started looking into other frameworks. I found that Ruby on Rails has a substantial advantage to programmers looking to build using O.O. (Object Oriented) Theory. This was a great framework for smaller applications, but found that in larger scale applications it requires more overhead. I had a lot of difficulty with garbage collection.

I now primarily build in PHP, using classes and functions for content management. While with Coldfusion, I was using SQL Server 2000; I now primarily build using MySQL as the database server. I also build using table-less HTML to meet w3c standards that require tables to only be used for tablular data.

Well, thats enough of an intro on me. As time progresses, I’m certain that everybody will learn a lot more about my talents and experience as I look forward to sharing those details. If you found my support helpful, please help our sponsors out through the google ads as they help to cover our hosting fees. Both myself and the companies appreciate it!