please review 'application/pdf' -- new version

[Keith Moore]

> 
> > that's certainly better than the original text.  however, I still
> > don't want IETF endorsing Adobe's insistence that PDF permissions
> > inherently reflect the content-owner's intent, nor that viewer
> > authors "must" take away legitimate rights from those who are
> > reading the documents -which are not completely the content-owner's
> > to control.
> > 
> > would you folks please stop trying to screw the public?
> 
> Keith,
> 
> It's a little hard to work through your conspiracy-theory
> approach to the topic. Certainly I can assure you that
> there is no intent to "try to screw the public". 

PDF's DRM is very much an attempt to screw the public, since it attempts
to take away rights that the public has and transfer them to the person
who packages the document in PDF format.  That may not be precisely the
intent, but it's the effect.  Calling it a name (like "conspriacy
theory") doesn't change the fact.

> I'm not sure what in the document would need to change.

I'll try to suggest specific text.
 
> Certainly a protocol that contains an ACL represents the
> intent of the sender of the ACL about the access to the
> data that is intended to be controlled by that ACL.

Well, any protocol that trusts the recipient of a document to honor an
ACL is in a pretty dubious security position anyway.  But I don't see a
problem  with saying that this is what PDF permissions "mean".  I do see
a problem with saying that implementations "must" honor those
permissions.

> In any case, the IETF, when publishing an informational document, does
> not "endorse" the document or any IPR rights claimed in it --

The disclaimer notwithstanding, it still creates the appearance of IETF
support.  This would hardly be the first time that a vendor has tried to
get the appearance of legitimacy for a harmful practice by publishing it
as an RFC.