From PDF For Lawyers:
One thing that makes PDFs superior to TIFFs as a format for storing digital documents is PDFs ability to incorporate security features. Many lawyers aren’t aware of the full features of Adobe Acrobat. Of course, you password protect a document so that it can’t be opened, but that’s not something you’re likely to do if you produce PDFs as part of the discovery process. However, did you know that you can also lock down particular features and prevent the user of a PDF from printing? And you can also prevent the user from ‘copying and pasting.’
If you are thinking that this would be a great thing to do when producing documents in litigation, think again. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (and many state rules) specify that documents must be produced in native form, or ‘in a reasonably usable form’ (which means a searchable form). So producing ‘locked down’ PDFs is probably not a good idea.
