Tell Them What You Think

TTWYT’s development blog and related musings

See here for the background — today, there are two more DRM’d PDFs from Defra, and another one from Ofgem. What’s going on?

TellThemWhatYouThink tries to get a list of documents for each consultation it finds. When it finds documents, it indexes them, so that they can also be checked when you perform a search, or when new consultations are matched up against email alerts.

These documents come in a variety of formats. One of those formats — PDF — allows its creator to set a “no-copy” bit. This prevents users from selecting and copying text from the document, and also prevents TellThemWhatYouThink’s indexing tool from converting the document into a form it can read. This is a crude form of Digital Rights Management.

I settled down this morning to figure out why all of the documents from one of Defra’s current consultations were unable to be indexed. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that all of them have the no-copy bit set. I can’t index them. You can’t copy & paste any of the text into your response as a quote. You can’t copy an excerpt to a discussion board.

This is all fantastically irritating, of course, but more to the point: what on earth is government doing copy-protecting its consultation documents?