Hi Wayne,

Even checking out the document, as Blake suggested, wouldn't prevent other users from opening a read-only copy of the document while someone else is accessing it, so that doesn't sound like it would work for you. 

If you must enforce that only one individual is able to view and open the document at once to comply with copyright laws, we'll have to think out of the box here. To grant document access to only one user at a time, you would need to use a combination of Forms and Workflow. By default, users would not have rights to view these copyrighted documents. You could then create a Form that has a list of all available documents as well as an option for the user to select the amount of time they would like to "check out" the selected document for. This list would pull from a database table, which is kept up to date by Workflow so that the documents listed as available would only be those that nobody else currently has "checked out." Then, when a user submits their request via Forms, Workflow would find that document, grant that user rights to the document, wait for the amount of time the user requested the document for, then remove that users access rights after the time period had elapsed. That same workflow could send the user a link to their document as soon as it's ready. Upon the submission of a document request form, Workflow would also need to remove the document in question from the table of available documents, wait for the amount of time that the user requested the document for, and then re-add the document to the list of available documents. With this setup, only one user at a time would be granted access to a particular document.