David: Paizo sells PDF versions of FlipMats (among other things) specifically so that people can use them for Virtual Table Tops. If you think someone is doing something illegal, just flag it for the moderators.
Ern: It is possible to export the files without having to open the PDF for editing. You have a few different options, but (as I've discovered) there are some caveats...
Mac:
According to Vic Wertz and other Mac users, you can simply drag an image from Adobe Reader X, drop it on the desktop, and it forms a TIFF file with the transparency info intact.
PC:
Adobe doesn't support drag & drop copying on the PC version of Reader X. Instead, you can select and image copy it (Ctrl+V or right-click) and then paste it in another graphics program.
Another option is to download either Some PDF Image Extract or PDF Image Extraction Wizard or a similar product. These can be used to extract all images in one fell swoop. Some PDF is easier to use, but in my experience it will only save to JPEG (in spite of claims to the contrary) and it crashes in between files. The Extraction Wizard is more powerful and can can save to a multitude of formats, but unlike Some PDF, it is not freeware.
PC Caveat:
These methods works great for maps and other rectangular graphics, but if it's an illustration masked by transparency, you'll get black showing up where ever it was supposed to be transparent. Thus far I have not been able to find any work around to this sort of taking a screen capture of the open PDF and just cropping it. Posts to the Adobe support forums have gone unanswered, and even searching across the internet suggest that no one has found a solution.
Use GIMP and there is a script that will turn the black into transparent(alpha channel). The only problem with this is that if the image has black anywhere other than the background, it becomes transparent as well. I wish Paizo would use a color like hot pink so it would be easy to auto strip the background.
Yeah I've done the same thing in Photoshop, but (as you say) the elimination of areas that actually are supposed to be black is annoying. Sometimes I'll add a magenta layer beneath the image so that I can see where to re-add black by hand, but it's annoying since this should be something that can actually be automated rather than requiring actual editing.
Chief Technical Officer
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This isn't about security, as we don't disable image extraction.
Open the PDF with Adobe Reader 7, 8, or X (but *not* 9, which doesn't support image extraction). Use the Image Selection tool to select an image. Copy and paste into your target document.
The only catch is that when you have a full-page map, Reader treats it like a page background instead of an image, and to select a page background, you have to either Ctrl-click (Windows) or Option-click (Mac OS X).
(The whole transparency thing is usually irrelevant to full-page maps, because they don't generally have alpha channels.)