this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Just because the visible footer gets removed doesn't mean there isn't other unique tracking information hidden deep in the PDF that could still get the lawyers sicced on you. Depending on how valuable this information is to the company, and how litigious they are, you have to judge how far they might've gone and might yet go to protect it.
Unfortunately, that's why this kind of copy protection can an actually be an effective tactic to prevent individuals from sharing their copies. While there might be ways to strip this kind of hidden data on simpler PDFs... even resorting to methods like screenshotting or printing and scanning, still cannot give you absolute confidence that there isn't some subtle unique identifier invisibly hidden in the layout or through subtle inconspicuous variations, especially if you're doing this regularly and they start targeting you and your account for identification. And on complex PDFs there are so many more ways they could hide this information digitally if they know where to look for it and you don't. 99% of the time it's going to be pretty obvious to strip out, but are you willing to take that risk even if you do find a technical method of removing the visible footers? If it's a one-off, maybe you can get away with it, but in the long term this strategy is not viable and is a trap for rookies.
The only truly safe way to share digitally watermarked content like this is to buy it with a burner account and full opsec in the first place. Nobody to sic lawyers on if it's a hacked paypal or a stolen/prepaid credit card or an untraceable email and IP, or in a jurisdiction with no enforcement. Smash and grab, get the data anonymously and get out. Don't share stuff from your personal account that's literally got your name and banking information attached to it unless you can confirm it's bit-for-bit indistinguishable from other innocent copies with something like a checksum.
to really hammer home this “many ways to hide”: the PDF is kinda just like a container… it contains other things like images (the patterns for example)… these patterns are probably vector graphics (made up of lines rather than pixels)… this means you can magnify them basically infinitely… and they can contain transparent lines and all sorts of things. they could easily embed that same text in the SVG image, at tiny scale (less than a pixel at 100% scale), and make it transparent… no PDF editor is going to touch the image data: it simply doesn’t really understand it to that degree - it’s an image; not a PDF after all… so that information will remain even after you’ve removed all visible/reasonable marks
this is just 1 example of practically infinite places it could be - and remember, this text is just lines in an image! it’s not like you can ctrl+f for the text necessarily… you’d have to go through every image manually and inspect every single line, and even then there are no guarantees (perhaps they encoded that information like morse code in bumps in some lines that are only barely visible at 1000% magnification)
How do you do this? Asking for a friend.
/joke
Make friends with terminal illnesses.
You can just buy a prepaid gift card from a convenience store and pay cash for it.
Then do online purchase with it and download the contents through tor.
I have yet to get an online service to accept the gift card I purchased for thus
Subscription based services typically don't.