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January 13, 2006
Ethics Question for Me
The AccessData product can help me with a problem I have; I just can't decide if it's ethical.
I love reading about wooden boats and a few years ago I bought 20 years of Wooden Boat magazines on CD in Acrobat format. It was expensive, something like $295 and I paid the full amount.
I'm interested in building a particular kind of wooden dingy (a small 10-12 foot rowboat). I want to through the Wooden Boat issues on the CD and extract pages of interest to me and paste the extracted pages into one document that I can save under my own file name. In that way, I'll have all the articles I want conveniently located in one file.
But, the extract pages function is protected by a password that I do not have. Apparently, Wooden Boat sold me the CD and wanted to prohibit me from extracting pages and mixing and matching them. It's frustrating and when I saw the AccessData password cracking program, I asked them if they could break an Acrobat password. "Oh, yeah, no problem. Take about a minute," they said. "You can do it with our demo program."
Do I? If I break the password, I'm clearly violating the intent of the vendor of the CD. Yet, I paid for all the issues and all I want to do is re-arrange them. I could print them out and collect them into one notebook binder. So, I'm just doing on disk what I could do on paper. I'm saving trees. But, I'm breaking a password to do it.
How about it? What do you think? Yes or No?
Posted by DavidK at January 13, 2006 12:08 PM | Permalink