You will NOT need the LiveCycle DRM system (unless you insist on Adobe products), but you WILL need a DRM system of some sort which allows you to set expiration dates.
Now, as DRM systems or services do cost some money (you get what you pay), and if you think about it, it may not really be necessary to have a "hard" protection, you could do something very "weak" using JavaScript:
You place a field, for example a Button field, of the size of the page over all the pages. If you have a button field, make an icon stating that the document has expired. Let's name this field "cover". In the PageOpen script of the first page, add something like this code:
var now = new Date() ;
var expiration = new Date(<expiration date>) ;
if (now < expiration) {
this.getField("cover").display = display.hidden ;
this.dirty = false ;
} else {
this.getField("cover").display = display.visible ;
this.dirty = false ;
}
As I said, with digital right management, you get what you pay…
Hope this can help.
Max Wyss.
This solution does require JavaScript to open. However, there are viewers which may ignore fields, a