Tangentially related… I work IT in a CNC shop. Most engineering prints that we get to make parts to have various specs on them for materials and various finishes. Those specs used to be free years ago, but they’ve most all been replaced, but not really updated at all. Now everytime they have a revision change, we have to buy the new revision from SAE for like $70 a piece. As shitty as that already is, in recent years, they have DRM locked them to a single user. So while we have 50+ employees with multiple needing to reference these for quality inspection or processing, it’s against the ToS to share those specs. We are supposed to buy one for each user which is fucking bogus.
Fuck em. I screen snip each page and make a new PDF, or that one user prints it out and scans it in. The extra kicker is that while that’s not allowed, you can buy a paper copy that can be shared for the same cost, you just have to wait for it to be delivered.
TL;DR: once “annotations” or “model codes” or whatever are incorporated into the actual law, they are no longer eligible for copyright.
That doesn’t stop organizations like SAE and ISO from trying to bully and trick you into agreeing to pay them for copies that you obtain directly from them instead of trudging down to the local law library and making copies yourself, however. (And it’s even worse when you want convenient electronic copies instead of paper, because then they try to apply EULA bullshit, which I’ve already debunked in another comment.) IMO it’s probably best to get the documents from some third-party source so you never get on the standards org’s radar for a shakedown to begin with.
If you can print, it means it’s possible. Maybe the built-in print to pdf driver transfers the DRM, but I’m convinced there is one that wouldn’t.
Edit: Or another idea, you can use features in screenshot programs like XShare that scroll through the document and take multiple screenshots and assemble it as a single image, or even PDF iirc, and that one wouldn’t have DRM (but wouldn’t be searchable without OCR.)
All of the audits we have to do, yea. They just care that we making good parts, that our paperwork is filled out correctly, and processes are being followed. Technically, if we didn’t have any of the specs but still did the process correctly, they wouldn’t care.