Currently, you cannot copy text from a PDF file that's been protected for editing by a password.

To me this doesn't make sense. Copying text out of a PDF file isn't an operation that's altering the PDF file's content.

I receive bank account statements as PDF files protected for editing (which is a legal necessity). ... In order to create my balance, though, I need to copy the valuta data from the PDF to, for instance, a Microsoft Excel worksheet. Currently this is not possible.

So, I'd like to suggest to allow clipboard copy operations without first unlocking PDF files protected for editing by a password.

To keep users from phishing designs, maybe only text copy operations ("CF_UNICODETEXT" on Windows) should be done without entering a password, so only the text itself is copied to the clipboard, not font, format or images.