ERROR: This document is locked. Your permission to view it has expired.

[TaylorandFrancisSWS]

Hello,

I've been trying to find a workaround to open a PDF document that's displaying the message "this document is locked. your permission to view it has expired"; i've tried using PDFunlock.com, opening the document in Word as a Word document, installing Adobe Acrobat and using that to open the file, and i've tried setting my computer's time and date backward to an older date.  I'm still unable to open this document as is everyone else who's tried it (and similar files).  We generally are running Windows 7 and 10 Enterprise machines with Adobe Reader xi, and Office 2016.

This is an "issue" with the document itself and not my Adobe Reader software as i can open other PDFs without issue-it seems to be a valid security feature that we cannot seem to move past.  There are many of these "expired" PDF files that i need to open at my company-the previous gentleman left the company and left these files behind with no way for us to seemingly work with them.   Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. 🙂

[Joel_Geraci]

If the file was encrypted with LiveCycle DRM or some other server based security application, you probably won't be able to unlock it. PDFUnlock.com... whose legal use is dubious at best... will only work on PDF files where the encryption is self contained. This message makes me thing you'll need access to the server that encrypted the file.

Can you send a screen shot of the message?

[TaylorandFrancisSWS]

Hi Joel

Thanks so much for the quick response; please see the attached error.

[Joel_Geraci]

I don't see an attachment.

[TaylorandFrancisSWS]

It may have been stripped? I’m not seeing it in Mimecast on my side. Thanks for your help.

[Test Screen Name]

You cannot email attachments. They are always stripped. Please return to the forum and post, using the add picture icon.

[TaylorandFrancisSWS]

Here's the dialogue box we are receiving on these files:

[Test Screen Name]

Your tests seem to have shown it is the documents, rather than a Reader issue. If that's the case Adobe have no tools or techniques to help you (or people who would want to hack). I've looked into the message and can't find the security software used, unfortunately.