You are probably close to the mark. I don't know if either of us can generalize as to why people release their work in PDF (I should have said, "In my experience/opinion"). I have found that if you copy and paste PDF text, it drops a given letter from every word, so reconstructing the text is awfully time-consuming. I do not know if this behavior is universal or an optional behavior set at the time of creation.
I -did- mean to imply that the seeker was trying to crack PDFs; I've done the same thing, for (what I believed to be) legitimate reasons -- namely laziness :) not wanting to type in all that damn text. But I suppose you are correct in that without knowing the legality or motive behind the poster's code, it's wrong to wimp out on answering questions.

(You know the old saw about ass-u-me)

e-mail neshura