Executive issue + engineering solution = Aaaaaah! (Score 1)

I don't believe you and think you posted this just to bait us. But DRM (and what a counter-productive concept it is) isn't even the biggest red flag here.

Someone in the company is asking you to fix an executive/managerial problem by writing more code. After all, that's the workflow everyone is used to: the guys upstairs want something done, and the geeks go to work.

But there are tasks which are not solved by coding. Some tasks are problems that are more organizational in nature, and are best solved by a good executive and his or her experience managing an entire company, its people, customers, and line of products [try no to laugh please].

The real question is, why are you being asked for DRM in the first place? Who is trying to protect company PDFs (of all things), from whom?

I have no idea what the situation is at your place, but I was once asked to write a collaborative (sort of) web app that would enforce the prices salesmen should charge for each product, by forcing them to use it to generate contract documents. The project brief was a nightmare of Philip K. Dick paranoia run amuck.

Your mission now, as was mine then, is to convince someone above you that they must also do some work once in a while. In fact, this is one of those times when they should possess a real expertise that you do not, and show that off. Executive problems are best solved by executives, just as you would never ask a VP of Marketing to write an app.