Need A Secure Format For Legal Documents

[bapak]

We are now sending contracts out in pdf format converted / created from MS Word. However Adobe has a Text Recognition function which converts text images into text, thus allowing one to copy our contract and paste onto his own Word document. If we send the contracts out in jpg format, one can convert it into pdf format upon receiving.

Currently we are printing the contracts onto paper and scanning it into a jpg or pdf file before sending it out by email. This method reduces the ability of Adobe’s Text Recognition function because scanning makes the contract a little blurred. However the downside is that a huge attachment file (jpg or pdf) is created. A ten pages contract could be 3 to 5 MB. Some of our contracts are more than twenty pages long.

Does anyone know of any format we can save / protect our contracts more? Maybe we can use some other format or password locking function which allows only viewing and prohibits highlighting and copying.

We understand that ultimately, if someone is so persistent to copy our contract, he can simply type it out. This, we can never prevent, but it sure makes it a little harder to copy our contracts.

[singa-traz]

What's your budget for this?

I have previously used some solution for this (IP protection).

Will PM you the link.

[Crushdepth]

If we send the contracts out in jpg format, one can convert it into pdf format upon receiving.

Look into digital signatures. If someone changes a single character or bit in the document (any format you like) the signature will not verify. So you can always detect and reject 'amended' contracts, and positively identify unmodified originals.

There is a multitude of free open source tools to do this.

[keemapoot]

Use efax, which you can convert your pdf docs into fax and then send as faxes.

[nikster]

I think Adobe Acrobat can do this, it's called Enterprise Rights Management, prevent copy to clipboard. See here

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/segments/enterprise/

There will be ways around it of course. But as you said, somebody could just type the whole thing from a printout. You could explicitly forbid copying as part of the contract (?!) and maybe watermark the contract. Just add a clause that doesn't mean anything legally but that identifies the contract as yours.

[Nio]

If you are worrying about them cutting and pasting your contract, it would be very simple for them to simply retype the whole contract themselves.

Digital signatures on both the sender and the receiver are the way to do this.

You as the sender can create a digital signature and send a digital signature key to the receiver.

The receiver with the digital key will be the only one able to open the contract.

[Supernova]

Information Rights Management

Microsoft Office 2003

Microsoft Office 2007 + Safeguard Office 2007 files

[welo]

Does anyone know of any format we can save / protect our contracts more? Maybe we can use some other format or password locking function which allows only viewing and prohibits highlighting and copying.

I thought this feature has been part of PDF for a long time. A couple of years ago I did a project for a client where we would encrypt the pdf with a 128bit key (note: this is not the simple password protected pdf but a real 128bit encryption which is hard to crack). Any PDF Reader would query the password upon opening the file. Of course, any person that knows the password and opens the file will be able to copy it in some way. The PDF format supports disabling of copying and printing .

However, any solution that displays the content on the screen will be vulnerable to any OCR software. Anybody will be able to do a screenshot and run a good OCR software on it. This is not easily preventable. Just look at all the forum software that will make you enter a view letters to shut out bots (software) from posting spam. The letters have to be heavily distorted in order to prevent OCR from working. Do you want your contracts to look like this?

welo

[Crushdepth]

If you just want to make OCR difficult, you could:

* Use an unconventional font. I doubt that OCR would work at all on some of the fancy script ones (of course, your contract will look a bit weird).

* Reduce the contrast of the text (use a light shade of grey rather than black).

* Add some random noise and speckles to the document in photoshop.

* Scan the page at an angle (OCR doesn't work so well if the text isn't straight on the page, although Acrobat can automatically straighten the page these days).