MDT Director Jim Lynch’s slide show on Highway 35 traffic issues near Flathead Lake is as good a place as any to start. Delivered at public meetings on 4 & 5 June 2008 in Polson and Kalispell, Lynch’s presentation is now available for download from MDT as a 3.5-megabyte PDF.
There’s just one problem. That PDF — and apparently every other PDF produced by MDT; even PDFs of agendas for public meetings — is crippled with security restrictions that defy common sense. You can open the PDF, you can print it, and if you’re handicapped (blind), you can extract the text for accessibility.
And that’s all.
Want to select a block of text from Lynch’s Highway 35 slide show to paste into a letter to Director Lynch? Or paste a meeting agenda item into a news story? Not allowed. You’ll have to type the words in letter by letter.
Want to place a page in a page layout program such as Adobe’s InDesign? Not allowed. There are some convoluted workarounds, but none for efficiently placing a high resolution copy of a page in document.
Want to conduct an internet search for the document? “All contents of the document are encrypted and search engines cannot access the document’s metadata.” Forget Google. Your only option is the MDT website’s search function.
Want to risk running afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act? You can use an application such as PDFKey Pro to remove the MDT’s security restrictions and restore your ability to select text and graphics, and to place pages in other documents.
But why should you have to risk legal action under the DMCA just to electronically select text from a document that is in the public domain in the first place?
The policy extends at least as far back as 2004 — and the Schweitzer administration actually has moderated it slightly. The PDF of the 29 October 2004 minutes of the Montana Transportation Commission, available on the MDT’s website, even forbids text extraction for handicapped accessibility. That discriminatory lockout has been discontinued, possibly by accident rather than by design. In any event, MDT today still continues to forbid content copying and page extraction even in documents intended for public distribution such as agendas for meetings of the MTC.
I do not yet know whether MDT is the only state agency that has this PDF policy, but I do know that Governor Schweitzer’s office does not impose these restrictions on PDF documents that it provides for public distribution.
So, let’s hear from you Director Lynch. Why are you doing this? When are you going to stop doing it? And let’s hear from you, too, Governor Schweitzer. Lynch is your appointee. Why are you allowing him to place unnecessary, indeed downright silly, restrictions on MDT’s PDF documents? When will you order him to stop doing it?