Locking documents so that they can not be printed or downloaded directly?

Locking documents so that they can not be printed or downloaded directly?

by Lee Richards -
Number of replies: 5

I put many presentations up on Moodle for my classes.  I currently just upload a .ppt presentation via file.  Some have been donated to me by industry professionals and I would like to find out if there is an option in Moodle that will allow me to lock those presentations so that they can be viewed but the entire file can not be downloaded?  I understand that they could always be printed/saved via screen shot but that makes the process quite a bit harder than just downloading the file and saving it to your hard drive.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,

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In reply to Lee Richards

Re: Locking documents so that they can not be printed or downloaded directly?

by Dave Perry -

There is a way to protect PDFs from being printed, if you have full fat Adobe Acrobat (Pro). But there are tools out there to defeat PDF security.

In all seriousness, the only way I can think of would be to make them into SCORM packages. Any other way is going to be easy to rip.


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In reply to Lee Richards

Re: Locking documents so that they can not be printed or downloaded directly?

by Emma Richardson -
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I think you can do this if you put the powerpoint in google drive and then share it from there.

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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: Locking documents so that they can not be printed or downloaded directly?

by Ken Task -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers

+1 Emma ..

Please see: https://lifehacker.com/google-drive-now-lets-you-block-downloading-or-copying-1717942323

'spirit of sharing', Ken

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In reply to Ken Task

Re: Locking documents so that they can not be printed or downloaded directly?

by Gemma Lesterhuis -
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Might be a stuped solution but what I did for a while is saving the powerpoint as a video and upload a PDF print 3 Slides on a page so students can print that and place notes. You don't even need a PDF program to make the PDF anymore in Office, so this was an easy solution. 

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In reply to Gemma Lesterhuis

Re: Locking documents so that they can not be printed or downloaded directly?

by Randy Thornton -


I think that is a very clever solution. I have clients put such things in videos too, and using Vimeo you can prevent downloads and limit the domains too. Similar to the SCORM idea, that the file can't be downloaded at all.

However, in the end, nothing will defeat screenshots of static pages if someone really wants to get the document, or even taking photos of the screen.

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