Although DRM is hated by many users for forcing various arbitrary limitations on them, in today’s world of digital content it is a necessary evil. Many end recipients of said content might feel that it is not necessary at all, as it only hinders legitimate users while not proving to be a real deterrent to those who would pirate it. In this respect, the old adage that locks are for honest people is certainly true. But it is just as true that if there were no locks at all, even the honest people would find it much easier to stray from the right path. To get some real perspective, one has to be in a situation where they have created content that they are about to share with others, in whom they don’t have a great deal of trust. DRM is best known for its presence in music, but the average user never really creates any music of their own, they do however probably create text or images as part of their daily usage of the computer. It is no secret that novice writers are scared of submitting manuscripts to publishers in case the publishers might steal them, and while this never ever happens, the fear is still there. Similarly, photographers watermark and scale their photos down to minuscule sizes when posting them online or first sending them to publications to prevent the same chimerical theft.

Both of these practices are unproductive as the actual product of your work will not get seen as it should be, and this is bad for you in the long run. What is needed in cases such as these is a simple, honest lock, such as PDFKey Pro.

What it does
PDFKey Pro is a simple application that you can use to lock your PDF documents. Restrictions can be placed on any document you create, and they can be absolute or only partial. The program can also be used to remove restrictions from the documents you have protected yourself, in case things go wrong and you lose the original.

Working with it
The first step in working with PDFKey Pro is having an actual PDF document to lock. This might sound like a big step for those who have never actually created a PDF, but it really is not. The beauty of PDFs is not only that they are an international standard that most computers can read out of the box, but also that it is so tightly woven into OS X. Even if you have never even opened a PDF, you can create one quite quickly by using the very same program you use for writing or working with your images. Simply open the content you want, go to File, Print, and select the save as PDF option. This will ‘print’ your content, but instead of getting it on paper, you will get it on the virtual pages of a PDF document. Virtually all OS X applications support this as it is a core service that they tap into. Not only will this approach preserve your page layout for text documents, but in the case of images, you can ‘print’ on various page sizes, letting you keep your photos or images as close to their original size as possible.

Once your PDF is ready, all you have to do is either drag and drop it to the appropriate well in the PDFKey Pro window, or select the right menu option and navigate to it.

When it comes to locking documents, you have several choices. Firstly, you can protect the entire documents so that a password is required to open it. You can choose how heavy the encryption should be from the drop down menu, but be aware that a higher level of security combined with large documents will lead to significant processing times. Secondly, you can protect specific interaction with the document, making it so that a password is required in order to copy content out of the PDF, or to print it. Last but not least, you can choose any combination of the above, including all of them, but this will probably make working with your document a huge pain.

After you set everything and the document is processed, a new protected copy will automatically appear next to the original, but you can change the destination in the preferences.

For unlocking documents you have protected yourself, all that is needed is to open them and input the correct password. This will remove the limitations, and save a new unlocked version of the document.
This is intended for your own documents, and not as a method of circumventing protection. As such, it will not remove DRM form PDFs and it will not work unless you can remember the right password.

The Good

Makes it very easy to create protected documents in order to safely send out text or images. Very clean and simple to use.

The Bad

If you cancel the locking procedure it will still go through and make a new ‘locked’ version of the original, although there will not be any restrictions to it. While not a huge issue, it can be annoying as you will have to go and manually delete the additional file yourself.

The Truth

PDFKey Pro is a simple lock for giving you peace of mind. The PDF files it works with a re very easy to produce, regardless of what other programs you create the original content with, and a standard that everyone should be able to open and view.

Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge: