Make document viewable but not downloadable or printable?

Question

Is there an application to make something viewable a la google book previews (no copy/paste, no saving web page as PDF, no printing from browser)? I'd like to make a document viewable to others, but would like to deter any replication/distribution.

I realize that someone could take a screenshot, but would still like most "obvious" methods of replication prevented. Google books is a great example as it's readable, but most other activities are prevented.

Is there any way of sharing something like this?

This is for a work application... so I'm not sure if that limits things further, as I wouldn't upload it to an external service. I have MS Sharepoint available.

I have considered working with a PDF. I supposed with Acrobat Pro it could be non-printable and password protected, which would kind of work, bu then I'd need to control password knowledge.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Note that this kind of limitation is intrinsically somewhat silly, because if the capability to display a document exists, than the capability to download or print it has to exist. If nothing else, there's always the screen buffer to get it from. There will always be a way around whatever limitations you impose. Moreover, as a security analyst, I would say that if you are trying to impose this limitation then you are doing something fundamentally wrong, most likely in that you are sharing confidential information with people that you evidently do not trust. While the mistrust is often purely due to potential user stupidity, this situation still indicates that you should review on a higher level how you handle sensitive information.

That said, virtually your only choice for this kind of protection is in the DRM features of Adobe Acrobat, which will allow you to restrict document use to viewing (not printing). Acrobat does not provide a good solution for secure distribution because this is beyond its scope. The good solutions in this area are public-key cryptography solutions like the commercial PGP or FOSS OpenGPG (really just a FOSS implementation of the PGP standard, which is largely open). The less good solutions are web-based document management solutions.

Answer 2

Scribd has some great embedding tools and allows you to control what people can do with a document.