[LINK] Proposed national legislation for Minimum Energy Performance and Labelling

[Tom Worthington]

Jan Whitaker wrote:
> At 11:23 AM 19/09/2009, Tom Worthington wrote:
>> ...details of the discussion forum are in the form of PDF files
>> which have been set to prevent copying, making it very difficult to
>> distribute ...
> 
> Can't you just forward or point to the link? ...

Sorry, I put the link in my blog, but forgot to include it in the email:
<http://www.energyrating.gov.au/pubs/2009-meps-labelling-public-forums.pdf>

I didn't want to forward the document to the mailing list, as it
contains only a few hundred characters of useful information in 145
kbytes of PDF. Also all but the last of the events mentioned in the
invitation have past and the reader might not have the patience to read 
down to the relivant bit.

What I wanted to do was copy and paste the relevant bit into the
message, but the PDF security setting prevented me from doing that. I
could have manually transcribed the information, but that would risk
getting the details wrong and anyway, the Environment Department is not
paying me to work on this. ;-)

> I can understand locking down content so it's not edited or taken out
> of context. ...

In this case there was a need to take some of the content out of
context, to remove the unnecessary and obsolete information and make the
remainder more readable.

If I had malicious intent I could produce an edited version of the
document, by retyping the text, using "Print Screen" to copy the
government logo and the author's facsimile signature.

Clearly security was not a concern in this case as the discussion paper,
which is the more important document, was not similarly protected and I
was able to copy useful quotes from that:
<http://www.energyrating.gov.au/library/pubs/200908-meps-labelling-discussion.pdf>.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/people.php?StaffID=140274