Protecting Scans

Having spent time scanning and transcribing various documents that I have found online, purchased and have obtained by other means, and uploading them to my web server, it is too easy for someone finding my page and just downloading the scan for their own use.

While I don't mind that people do this I have decided that I am getting no benefit from doing this. An example of this is the scan of the article from the Halstead Advisor. This page was found but the visitor only visited my PDF page and no other pages.

Implementation:

This is at least the fourth variation of this shimming technique.

This is a an example link: to a PDF on my server. There is actually a link in the modal dialog.

Notes

An added protection is to omit the .pdf from the destination URL. If the visitor finds that the link is "clickable" it will return a 404 and it is then easily found by completing the URL.