Copywriting material

[Christob]

HI All

Quick question, what is the steps to copyright material that you have desinged and wish to place on a internet site that is only open to subscribers but you want to stop them from copying and dishing out to everyone? I know that it will not stop all the copying persons as pirating seems to be a SA past time...but it might help to deter the masses.

Thanks

Christo

[daveob]

I have seen some sites where, if you right click, you get a message instead of the usual copy / paste menu.

Probably just some javascript code.

[daveob]

OK. done a quick search, and here's a site to start looking at :

http://www.graphicsacademy.com/howto_preventcopy1.php

[Chatmaster]

A very handy site to utilize is www.copyscape.com they use fairly advanced method of finding copy thieves, they can also email you if they find suspected copy theft how ever you will have to pay for that service.

The right click disabled method is flawed in that you can still go to the browser menu and view the source code, so it is a complete waste of time. I am also pretty sure that Ctrl C still work despite the JS you utilize.

[daveob]

Hi Roelof

Agreed. I doubt that we'll even find a water tight solution for this, but the requirement was : that it will not stop all the copying persons .....but it might help to deter the masses.

Maybe we should ask the gurus on RAC for a solution. Could be worth spending $20.

[Chatmaster]

The problem with disabling right click comes with the fact that you will find you cause more inconvenience to your good visitors than deter anyone from stealing your content. Several visitors utilize the right click functionality for navigation like open in a new tab etc. They far outnumber the uninformed with regards to copy theft. Copy thieves know the ropes and will certainly copy your content regardless of what you do. You can even go as far as embeding it in flash or even a image, they will still get it. Rather just monitor your copy.

[RKS Computer Solutions]

One way of detering any copy/paste issues, is to have the site written in Flash... It's a pain in the butt, you have to have an extremely good coder for this, and your data needs to be flash in flash...

What I mean by this is, your page opens up, and the main macromedia file loads up, which acts as a backend for the site. The Macromedia file then contacts a DB server on the site (secured by localhost access, url encryption in the background) and loads data from pages in the DB... Not too sure if my description is 100% correct, but you should be getting the idea...

What this means then, is even if the source pages are viewed, even if the flash file is copied over to another server or to a desktop, the DB will not allow it access purely because it is not hosted on the same site as it...

Hope this helps

[Chatmaster]

Embedding text into flash does cause major usability and SEO issues, so hiding your content that way does come with a sacrifice unfortunately.

[RKS Computer Solutions]

Ahah, was hoping you'd bring that up... There have been various reports saying that Google will up the ante on their bot technology to be able to read flash.

I have read a few reports, and even the official Google stance on it, but it's been a while since then, do you have the skinny on it?

[Chatmaster]

Google can read flash but it is meaningless to their current algo and I cannot see that changing soon. The algo has a problem setting a proper internal linking structure theme. This cause major issues when you target keywords. Besides flash is not meant for designing a website in its entirety it is meant for more functional graphics, effective rich media adverts (they convert much better than the normal animated gifs) and other dynamic ads and graphics to improve a site's aesthetics.

[bullfrog]

If google can read all the flash sites, then surely someone else can write a bot program to read the exact same text that google can?

[Chatmaster]

Flash can be parsed in order for you to obtain content or even the original design. There are several software packages that can do that. However if you embed flash within flash and read the content from the database, those software packages cannot read the content, as far as I know neither can Google then...

[bullfrog]

Point proven...