How can I stop people copying my text?

Question

I'm in the middle of creating a website on webs.com and I have spent days upon days typing and I want to know is there a way I can stop people right clicking and copying my text and also highlighting and pressing ctrl+c and edit select all and copy etc. Is there a html code I can put on my website just to stop that happening?

Answer 1

You really can't. There are some Javascript snippets that you could include that will stop the general (uninformed) public, however this will not stop someone from plagiarizing your work.



To understand why, you have to know a little bit about how the web works. When you look at a web page you are not looking at the page on the server. Instead, you are actually looking at a copy of the page on the server that your computer just downloaded.



Every time someone views your website they are copying it! Luckily that doesn't mean they are also plagiarizing it. However once your page has been downloaded, you won't have the kind of control you need to stop it from ever being copied.



And none of the above takes into consideration the fact that someone can simply read off your text and write it down into an editor.



I wouldn't worry about it too much. It's bound to happen that some amount of your work will be plagiarized (at least if it's good). In reality, it probably won't affect you much if at all, and if it does you can always sue for copyright infringement.



There is some Javascript code in the reference if your heart in intent on using it. I would advise against it though, it only hurts the user experience.

Answer 2

The only sure-fire way is to not post the text on the Web in the first place. Once it's on there, any sufficiently determined person CAN get it. There isn't really any way around this.



You can, however, make it more difficult for them. One way is to write some Javascript code that will constantly shift the focus to some particular element many times every second, thereby deselecting any text that was selected before the visitor has time to press Control+C. This doesn't work against people who have disabled Javascript, but that isn't very common because many major sites these days require Javascript to be enabled in order to work. Another technique might be to put a gigantic transparent div over everything else, so that you can read through it but it's hard to select it. Alternatively, you could insert certain kinds of invisible elements between characters of text on the page so that it is still readable, but trying to copy it will end up getting lots of garbage material that is difficult to isolate from the real thing.

Answer 3

The short answer is that you cannot. The only certain means of making sure your work cannot be copied is to keep it off the public web, and never allow any copies into the hands of someone who might publish anywhere. Anything that gets printed is quite likely to end up on the internet.



Some people advocate technical tricks such as slicing your image into lots of small pieces and having the browser reassemble the parts for display. This certainly makes 'saving' from a browser hard work, as there are many parts that need to be saved. But a simple screen grab defeats all that completely.



The same applies to web authoring techniques that place the image in the background of a table or layer, and also disabling the right mouse button ability to save a file. The latter is especially annoying to Windows users who will find all their other right button options inaccessible too. Neither method will deter any but a casual user who isn't trying very hard.



Likewise, embedding your photos in Flash presentations or Acrobat PDFs offer little protection. Tools to capture and extract from these documents are freely available on the web.



And anyway, if it can be seen it can be screen captured. Visible watermarks are currently probably the most effective deterrent, if you find their appearance acceptable

Answer 4

There is no proper way to stop them. Even if you manage to write a javascript code that will stop them they may still disable javascript or just go directly into your html source and copy from there.



The only way you can possibly delay them from copying is if you put your text in an image so they cannot just highlight and push ctrl+c.



PROS

They will have retype it each character at a time.



CONS

They may use OCR (image recognition technology).

Will also delay your webpage

Makes your text ugly

Will leave people with the "what was the designer thinking" thought.



As you can see the CONS outnumber the PROS by far so this plan is impractical. Also some people highlight the text to help them read and know what they have read. Some may want to use your text as a source.



You can follow the same plan using flash but still it is not a good idea and I do not recommend it. You will just have to live with people copying your text or not publish it on the web.



If you really want to stop people you have to look to Copyright and Plagerism laws so you can take legall action to anyone who copies your text

Answer 5

Save the text as a picture something like Adobe Photoshop/elements, put the text on a background of various colours, so the text itself cannot be selected and if the image file is put through an Optical Character Recognition program the background pattern will cause the conversion to text to fail.

Answer 6

You could use CSS to place a transparent image over the text. People won't be able to select it easily...they could still take it out of the source though.