Sometimes people pay too much attention to details that tend to lose the complete picture. This is what happened to me when I was loooking for a way to copy a part of an article (for some notes I kept) from a “protected” pdf file. I tried to find a way to “crack” the protection instead of thinking how pdf readers operate.

First of all, an advice:
Don’t use the following trick to steal other people’s work! This is called plagiarism and may lead you in really embarassing situations.

It is possible that you came here looking for a pdf cracker or a way to trick adobe pdf reader (or similar software) but I will show you a different approach.

Ok, let’s explain how this thing works. Since you can read the text from the pdf file, the information is not really encrypted, in contrast there is just a “special instruction set” that tells the reader if an operation (selection, copy, print etc) is allowed.  What if the PDF reader ignores this “instruction set”?  Then all operations are allowed and you are free to perform all operations as with any non-protected document!

So, all you have to do is to find a pdf reader that ignores adobe’s “special instructions”.
In ubuntu, I use the preinstalled Evince and it works fine.

I am not aware of an equivalent reader in windows, but I’ll do some research…

Hope it helps,
Vasilis