Protected or not ... The PDF story

I definitely don't want to start a flame war regarding the DRM capabilities of the PDF format or of any of the asociated solutions. This is the year of the ebook so the inevitable happened. A friend asked me to give him some options to chose from in order to publish his books in PDF format and have at least minimal protection for it.
This was a trigger for an interesting ride. Interesting because I realized that in order to have a winner you have to define the most important features.

I am at least a little technical inclined and I understand the concept of features, benefits and advantages from a technical standpoint. On the other hand I am not the owner of the content and I don't intend to use such a solution at least for the short-medium term.
Given this situation, how do I select the best DRM solution for PDF? The answer is ... I can't select it.
I can continue of course by listing here long tables with features bet let's be fair. Who will read them?
Instead I will just give you my Top 3 DRM solutions for PDF protection and list some aspects that I consider relevant when I chose them.

Here they are:

Top 3 DRM solutions for PDF protection

1. LockLizard PDF Security: http://www.locklizard.com/pdf_security.htm
2. Vitrium ProtectedPDF: http://www.protectedpdf.com/
3. FileOpen Toolkit: http://www.fileopen.com/products/fileopen-toolkit/


Now the reason for the positioning of each of those suppliers/products:

Locklizard has a very easy to understand business proposal. The price is there on the website and you know what you buy. You start at 2495 USD per year or a 4995 USD for a perpetual licence.

Vitium ProtectedPDF looks like a more complete document protection solution. At first sight it is cheaper too at a 1200 USD per year price tag. There is an issue that minimize those advantages. The licensing scheme was created in such a way that it sound like "Hey, we are here to take your money not to give you a solution". May be it is just me but I don't like that. On the other hand If you want to start small and don't expect to distribute many document to many readers then Vitrium has definitely a leg start becouse of it's low price.

FileOpen Toolkit it is ... how should I say? It is a framework that offers you a lot of flexibility. That comes with a price. They don't give us an estimate of costs. You don;t know how much It will cost you to create that book selling machine of you dream. Of course, we can always ask but when it comes with software licenses + some development and integration costs we can be sure the price tag is not very low. Anyway it worth keeping an eye on them. Who knows what the future will offer us.

Hope that you will find this post useful. It is not the definitive guide you probably expect to find but it gives you a lead. I wish you all the best in your own research and hey .. if you find some usefull information on the subject you can always come back and make sugestions here.