Remember Dmitry Skylarov, the Russian scientist the US imprisoned last year for showing people how pointless Adobe's PDF "security" was? And whose former employer the US is still pursuing?

Well, time to add another notorious pirate organization to the list of defendants: Apple.

"Mac OS X's Preview program is able to ignore the security settings in an Acrobat encrypted file and do whatever it wants with the file. And if OS X's Preview can do this, then any program can be written to exploit this security hole. ... The process of destroying the security settings in an encrypted PDF document is surprisingly easy and straightforward."

See the link below for explicit, step-by-step instructions for gaining access to the files you've purchased, even if the person who created them has set "protection" flags that defeat fair use, format-shifting, excerpting, and the Doctrine of First Sale. Link Discuss (Thanks, Seth!)