Securing PDF and embedded video

Question

My company delivers programming instructions for products we sell in both streaming video (hosted on CloudFront) and pdfs (hosted on Amazon S3). We don't want for our customers to be able to take the content out of these PDFs, save the PDF, or be able to share the link. At the same time, we don't want for people to be able to streal the video (we're less concerned with the videos).

I've been racking my brain trying to figure out the best options on securing this. What are the limitations with PDF security, at the end of the day, can you stop them? Or at least make it really hard?

Answer 1

Unless you create and deliver your data in custom format, your own viewer with built-in content protection mechanisms, you are out of luck. Everything you deliver to the client can be captured, copied and distributed. With PDFs and video streams this is trivial.

Answer 2

If you can suffer the PDF generation overhead, you could individualize the PDFs by putting the customer's name on each page. Turn off editing as well, and that'll discourage people. It'll still be quite possible to get around these, of course.