Comment 3 for bug 127389

> Thanks for the patch. While the password owner check is trivial to circumvent, it is part of the PDF spec, and so breaking the implementation is not something that would be done in Ubuntu.

I was afraid you (the maintainer) would something like that. ;)

1) If you see it like this, ubuntu already breaks the PDF spec, because it ships kpdf, which includes the option 'obey drm limitations'. I didn't read the PDF spec, but probably it states, that a pdf-obey should obey drm limitation unconditionally.
2) The pdf spec is not holy. Specially ignoring the password owner check request, does not create problems (like creating non-conforming pdf documents). And if someone relies on the password owner check - well, that is not very intelligent.
3) Gentoo is not Ubuntu - but they integrated the patch into their pdftk package.
4) After having a quick glance at 3.5.2 of the pdf 1.7 spec, pdf tools are 'allowed' to do more with a pdfs than just displaying (additional operations), if the owner-pw is missing. What it is allowed depends on some attributes (user access permissions). And it looks like pdftk doesn't check this attributes and simply reject every operation if an owner pw is present (and not given at command line).

Regards
Georg Sauthoff