The Moriarty Tribunal cost the Irish tax payer more than 100 million Euro and all we got was a 2,400 page protected PDF.
If you view the report’s PDF files you won’t be able to quote from it by selecting and copying text. You’ll have to manually type out anything you want to extract because the files are protected.
Value for money eh? Anyway, I ran the pdf files through the tool “pdftotext” and came up with m1.txt and m2.txt.
Use the original PDF files to read the report but for your convenience these text files will be much easier to quote from.
Please don’t link directly to them, mirror them on your own site if you write about them!
Here’s a Wordle tag cloud of the findings created by Jamie Lawrence.
If it’s any consolation they waste money like that here too :/
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6981/sitecontent_425-unprotected.pdf and http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6981/sitecontent_426-unprotected.pdf for the unprotected versions. Feel free to link directly!
You could just use okular and make sure the settings say NOT to obey DRM restrictions.
Fun fact, it’s (probably) a criminal offense to write that last sentence but only a civil copyright infringement offense for distributing the complete text. Of course the owner of this blog has opened himself up to both by not just posting the text but by also including another secret piece of knowledge, the magic instruction “pdftotext”.
Really Anon? Under EU law? That seems ridiculous in this case as the money that paid for this document came out of my pocket and every other Irish (and probably EU) tax payer too.
Regarding the criminal side of things, that came from an EU Copyright Directive so yes, under EU “law” (enacted in Ireland before it was made and then “fixed up” afterwards to match the final text). As for the copyright infringement, I didn’t look for any copyright information in the pdf’s but assume (thanks to the use of “DRM”) that it is copyrighted text and not freely redistributable.
IANAL and maybe a lawyer could successfully find a way to defend you under some form of “fair use” like exception, but if you asked me to place a wager on whether or not your could win any such case I’m afraid my money would be against you! I don’t think the fact that “our” money paid for the document matters though, Ireland and the EU don’t have anything like the USA’s rules which place government created content into the Public Domain.
Of course I 100% agree that it is ridiculous.
Thanks, well that’s crazy.
I’ve moved the text files out of the way but it’s fairly simple and well known to remove the protection on PDF files if anyone wants to know how.