this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Don’t watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits - Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 week ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] tal@lemmy.today 30 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

"Each page of plaintiff’s complaint appears on an e-filing which is dominated by a large multi-colored cartoon dragon dressed in a suit," he wrote on April 28 (PDF). "Use of this dragon cartoon logo is not only distracting, it is juvenile and impertinent. The Court is not a cartoon."

The Court is not a cartoon.

They're portraying themselves as a scalie, not you.

That being said, why is anyone involved here watermarking PDF with anything? I mean, normally the purpose of a watermark is to link content with the creator. But I seriously doubt that the text and the background image have been merged into some kind of raster image.

investigates

Yeah, they link to the original dragonized PDF.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.miwd.114988/gov.uscourts.miwd.114988.1.0.pdf

It's just text on top of the image. You can copy-paste the text:

DRAGON LAWYERS PC
Jacob A. Perrone (P71915)
Attorneys for Plaintiff
325 East Grand River Ave., Suite 250
East Lansing, MI 48823
Phone: (844) JAKELAW
jacob.perrone@yahoo.com

It's like having a screensaver on an LCD monitor.

And pdftotext, in poppler-utils, looks like it makes a pretty decent de-watermarked text file of it too.

[–] Incogni@lemmy.world 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

The Court is not a cartoon.

They're portraying themselves as a scalie, not you.

I think they meant this like "This court is not a cartoon, so keep your cartoon character out of it" - cartoon as in the medium, not the character.

[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 8 points 6 days ago

Fine, I'll wear my fursuit for the trial instead then

[–] SkybreakerEngineer@lemmy.world 10 points 6 days ago

It's not about anyone being a scalie, it's a cross between "I'm supposed to be reading the text here, take this seriously" and "modernity means we don't use powdered wigs anymore"

[–] Bezier@suppo.fi 21 points 1 week ago

It's like having a screensaver on an LCD monitor.

But screensavers are fun!

[–] Glitchvid@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

I gotta admit this got a chuckle out of me, I'd allow it.