Dear Leo, I’d like to make some money with my copyrights. What would be the
best way to copy protect my texts on my website? I do not think that not copy
protecting on my website at all would be the solution and spending my days
trying to remove the copies of my text from the internet is not the way I’d
like to spend my days. Do you have a solution as to how best copy protect my
texts on the internet? Maybe you would know what would be the best software to
use or maybe some other solution.
In this excerpt from
Answercast #70, I look at the difficulties in protecting copyrighted
material online.
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Copy-protecting websites
Well, I’ll put it this way: no, there is no practical, feasible way to copy
protect text on the internet. If you can see it, it can be copied.
There are lots of ways to make it more difficult. I have seen people use
Javascript to turn off the copy function in the browser. I have seen people
turn all of their text into an image so that you can’t just copy the text, you
actually have an image. But there are a raft of problems with either of
those kinds of solutions and other solutions that people have
proposed. Ultimately, they’re all circumvent-able.
In other words, pretty much anything you do to your text to make it harder
to copy does not make it impossible to copy.
I can copy it! If I can read it on the screen, if I can see it, I can make a
copy of it.
Managing online copyrights
So, I’m in the same boat you are. I have thousands of articles on my website
and I do make money from the advertising that runs on the site. It does, in
fact, harm me when other sites copy my information without my permission.
I have in fact sent out “Takedown notices” to a couple of places when I’ve
discovered that they are in fact, republishing my copyrighted material without
my permission.
But ultimately, you’ll notice that on Ask Leo!, I’ve done nothing technical
to prevent people from copying my text. Just because I know that futility
thereof.
It would give you a false sense of security. If someone was dedicated or
really motivated to copy the information off of your site, they’re going to
figure out a way to do it. God knows, I could!
It’s just not that terribly difficult. Copy protecting
is.
Design for the readers
So my recommendation is ultimately: make it easy for your readers to read
your text.
Don’t get in your readers’ way – and then prioritize your work. You know,
send takedown notices to the most egregious offenders. Set up some Google
Alerts so that you’re notified when something of yours appears out on the
internet, but then take it from there.
It’s just not the kind of a thing for which I believe there’s a practical,
technical solution.
Answercast 70 – Do disposable
email addresses really add any security?
Snopes does a pretty good job of disabling the ability to highlight text so that you can copy it, but even then you can “view source” and copy from there – yes, you’d have to do some editing to get rid of the HTML, but still, you’d have the text.
You only need to be able to ‘see’ the text.
Something as simple as opening Notepad and typing as you read gives you a near-perfect non-traceable reproduction, no matter how complicated or convoluted the protection on the text or the webpage.
Don’t like typing? photograph the screen and feed the image into OCR software. Less accurate, less time consuming.
As Leo says, if you can see it, it can be copied. If you make it difficult, you will deter more readers than copiers.
And imagine that some perfect technology is invented to make it so a page can’t be copied. All you’d have to do is pull out a digital camera and take a picture of your screen, and there you go… a copy!
16-Nov-2012
Paul Masters said:
Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, start notepad, Ctrl-V.
Leo:
And that is the biggest reason why copy protection won’t work. I bet you had no real desire to do a screen capture, until you found that the program was specifically designed to disable that feature. (I might have been tempted to submit a bug report on that one. (“I can no longer take screen captures of my program, if your program is running in the background.”)
There are plenty of people out there (and I am among them) who see such obstacles as a challenge, not because we need to copy/paste the text, but because someone went out of their way to make it “impossible” to do so.
Ken B – No, that doesn’t work in Snopes. Not in Chrome, anyway.
Ah… Firefox works using Ctrl-A/Ctrl-C, but Chrome does not. Apparently, Chrome supports a feature that Firefox doesn’t. (I don’t know is it’s a new HTML thing, or a Chrome thing.
Here’s the code: (“disableselect” and “reEnable” are Javascript functions to intercept the mouse clicks.)
if (typeof document.onselectstart!="undefined") document.onselectstart=new Function ("return false") else{ document.onmousedown=disableselect document.onmouseup=reEnable }Apparently, Chrome stops Ctrl-A from selecting text because of the “onselectstart” property, whereas Firefox does not.
One way to ‘protect’ your text on a web-page.
1. make images very difficult to ‘download’
2. put all of your text in one huge Captcha-styled image.
The Captcha will foil most methods of OCR (that’s what it’s there for) and simply re-posting the picture once they manage to get it will be easy enough to trace (google can already search based upon an uploaded picture)
Only thing though – i know i would not put in the required effort to read ‘pages’ of Captcha. I hate having to recognize two words…
Leo, your comments may be fine for your articles, which are short, and where it is not likely you would lose money be someone copying some of them and putting them on their own web site.
But, sometimes, we are talking a a long, valuable e-book where the author is dependent on income from the e-book sales. In this case, the harm to the author is much greater. It almost seems like you do not appreciate the purpose and benefits of copywrite laws.
You should follow up now, with an article on the best software programs and methods to use if an author WANTS to protect his work from being copied and given away or worse, re-sold to others.
20-Nov-2012
@Jack
You’re getting into a whole new topic in that question. In that case you would need to use some kind of DRM software which can protect your documents up to a point,but is still crackable. It’s a complex subject which is discussed in the links Leo included at the end of the article.