The below information is only for the purpose of Fair Use. The workaround is suggested because you already own the rights to the document but its overzealous creators restricted you more than they should. Your first workaround should be to contact the creator of the document to relax the restrictions. If you do not have the rights to the document, it is probably illegal for you to apply any of the suggested methods below. Check with your lawyer.

If you find yourself with a protected PDF (or what some people call “DRM-ed”), there’s a way to get around this. It’s not very elegant, but it works.

Here’s what the document properties window will look like, for a protected pdf, besides the “Lock” icon on your bottom left of Acrobat.

Protected PDF Document Properties

As you can see, it’s very restrictive. I cannot even cut-and-paste.

To work around this, you need to be able to print, which is allowed in my case. You need to print to a new file. Since I’m using Microsoft Windows, I’ve the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer.

1) Print to Microsoft Office Document Image Writer. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, from your print dialog window, choose the Image Writer. It’s pretty obvious if you’re on Windows. For other platforms, you probably have your own workaround, like Mac OSX pdf printing function.

2) Open the .mdi file created. From there, print to your PDF writer, like CutePDF.

3) Open the newly created PDF file and see the document security settings removed and everything else intact.

Note: Printing to a PDF writer directly, like CutePDF, does not work. Adobe probably realised this simple workaround and did something about it. You need to print/convert to another format, in this case the .mdi format, before printing/converting back to pdf format again.

Alternatively, you can try this suggestion here that uses Gmail as a workaround and metioned on Boing Boing. It doesn’t work as well as all methods above, but it’s definitely cross-platform.

Happy Fair Use-ing.