Perfectly good question. Flame-thrower holstered I'd say that Adobe make most of their money from selling PDF-generating software to big corporations who then go on to sell the output from these systems to *their* customers.
Imagine you'd spent thousands on such a system for converting your proprietary format document archives to PDFs for your clients to view---since Adobe's salesperson had told you that anyone could get hold of and run the viewer (which is, as you point out, free) easily. Then imagine your support line clogged up with paying customers complaining that, ever since they'd "upgraded" their PDF viewer to version 5, they'd been unable to read your stock reports or annual accounts or brochures.
At this point in the sorry story which way would you, as a person in an Armani suit, be pointing your trained attack lawyers?....
If you had created the pdf in Adobe's program.. then any customer can view it using the freely available Acrobat Reader. That at least would be a valid couter from Adobe... in fact.. they could go so far as to say that by limiting the access of other non-Adobe programs to viewing your work they are protecting you. As other pdf-viewing programs can actually bypass the password protection. How would said company respond to their passworded pdf being easily read and edited by third party software? _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp