Reputation: 9679

how to restrict user to copy web content

I am creating a web site and my client demands to restrict user to copy TEXT displayed on the web page.how can I do that? I am using PHP and HTML in my application.

Upvotes: 6

Answers (14)

Evans

Reputation: 1

  <script type="text/JavaScript">
  //script to bar copying of website contents
  function killCopy(e){
      return false  
  }
  function reEnable(){
      return true
  }
  document.onselectstart=new Function("return false"){
       if (window.sidebar){
           document.onmousedown=killcopy
           document.onclick=reEnable
       }
  };
  </script>

Upvotes: 0

RobFos

Reputation: 961

Even if he was to build the system in flash the user could still hand write out the content if they desperately wanted it, like everyone else said its impossible to stop a determined person from getting your content, unless of course you don't display it.

Upvotes: 2

Justin

Reputation: 4624

You may want to look at your target audience as well to help determine how you want to make it harder (since you can't realistically prevent it)..

For the simple user just disabling the right click may be good enough to prevent it. Slightly more work would be to do as others had suggested and create an image. With the image you'd probably want to set a background-image on a DIV or something since you can easily drag images, using the IMG tag, straight from the page onto you desktop, or wherever. From there you could use Flash, or some other RIA, or maybe even SVG/VML..

Anyone who knows how to do a screen capture really narrows down what you can feasibly implement :(

Upvotes: 0

Jay

Reputation: 27512

And it all gets back to "Why"? If the information is secret, don't show it to someone in the first place. If you're concerned about copyright violation, as others have said, once someone sees the text, even if you somehow came up with a brilliant technical solution that prevented them from copying the text in any way (which I doubt is possible), they could always write it down by hand, or take a picture of the screen with a digital camera and then OCR it. In the digital age, your protection against copyright violation is more legal than technical: if somebody steals your material and resells it, sue them.

Depending on the nature of your material, you may be able to make it awkward for people to get it all on one screen. Like, if you were running an on-line phone book and you were afraid of people stealing your listings, instead of displaying some large number of listings on one giant page -- all the "A"s or whatever -- you could require people to enter search terms and only show two or three possible hits at a time. Then if someone wanted to steal your listings, they would have to spend thousands of hours entering every imaginable search term. Now that I think of it, I was using some phone book site the other day that gave me a listing of names and addresses that were possible matches, but then I had to click on each one to get the phone number. At the time I thought "dumb nuisance", but now it hits me: they probably had the same idea that I briefly thought was original. Anyway, if your material is a database of individual factoids, this could be practical. If it's an article on the economic history of Lithuania or some such, making the user seach for it in tiny pieces is just going to make people abandon you and look elsewhere.

Personally, I've taken the philosophy that I just don't care. I've had many occassions when I've done Google searches on subjects that interest me and turned up articles that I've written, on sites that never asked my permission. I once even found an article that I wrote on one of those pre-written student papers web sites. (Not that any student would just paste his name on it, print it off, and hand it in, of course. They are "for research purposes only". I'm sure if they knew of students claiming this as their own work they would take down the site immediately.) So an article that I published on the web, available to anyone for free, these people were now charging dishonest students $25 to download! My reaction was, Way cool! It's one thing when others quote you, but you've really reached the big time when others plagiarize you!

Upvotes: 2

Ondrej Slinták

Reputation: 31970

Basically, you cannot. Even if there was a way to restrict user from copy & paste the text, they can always just grab the screen and translate it somehow into text.

I'd recommend not to try restrict users in any way. It's not really friendly and people usually hate it. If you want to create some private content, just make people to log in, do some ACL check and hope that they won't copy it somewhere else. You could also consider using some kind of license to prevent people from "stealing" your content.

Upvotes: 3

Josh

Reputation: 11070

As every other answer has said, there is nothing technically you can to to prevent people from copying the text of your page. For the text to be display to the user, you must send it to the user's computer, which means they can copy it.

However, you can legally prevent them from copying the text with a service like CopyScape

Copyscape is dedicated to protecting your valuable content online. We provide the world's most powerful and most popular online plagiarism detection solutions, ranked #1 by independent tests. Copyscape's products are trusted by millions of website owners worldwide to check the originality of their new content, prevent duplicate content, and search for copies of existing content online.

Copyscape provides a free service for finding copies of your web pages online, as well as two more powerful professional solutions for preventing content theft and content fraud:

Copyscape Premium provides more powerful plagiarism detection than the free service, plus a host of other features, including copy-paste originality checks, batch search, case tracking and an API

Copysentry provides comprehensive protection for your website by automatically scanning the web daily or weekly and emailing you when new copies of your content are found.

Read more on their site.

Upvotes: 5

GShenanigan

Reputation: 5493

As mentioned by every answer previously, there's no way to prevent someone from being able to use the copy from your site. Even if you use methods to restrict direct copy and paste, there are always screenshots, OCR or good old writing by hand.

Looking at it from a different perspective...if the content is sensitive and your client doesn't want it distributed, you COULD add it to a section of your site that requires registration and authentication to access. By doing this you could require that users agree to terms and conditions on registration which explicitly deny permission to reproduce any of the content from the site.

Just a thought.

Upvotes: 12

TRiG

Reputation: 10643

Well, the PHP has nothing to do with it, as that's server-side. You might be able to cook up something in javascript (it's fairly easy to disable right-click; it may also be possible to disable text highlighting), but it's fairly easy to get around this. Failing all else, the user might view source, though that can be encrypted too:

document.write(base64decode('encoded string containing entire HTML document'));

This is, frankly, both annoying and pointless. Anything that's available to the user can be taken somehow. Even flash isn't immune. (There are browser plugins available to take videos out of flash.)

Upvotes: 0

Grantismo

Reputation: 3819

If you presented content via images, or flash, and prevented the ability to save as that might be a solution. I found some resources you might find useful in protecting images here and some information on "preventing" print screen here.

Unfortunately, there is no easy solution for your question, as once the content is delivered to the user, they have ultimate control over the information (who's preventing them from taking an actual picture of the site?).

Upvotes: 0

Rich Adams

Reputation: 26584

This is not possible.

You cannot prevent someone from getting the information if you're sending it to them so they can see it. A user can simply view the source of the HTML and see what the text is and copy it from there and there's nothing you can do to stop them.

Implementing anything in JavaScript is completely ineffective since anyone can just disable JavaScript in their browser and get around it, and you'll only end up annoying your users.

The only way to prevent someone copying the text from a web page is to not put it on the web page in the first place.

Upvotes: 0

vvo

Reputation: 2881

you can force people to call a phone number to hear the text of your website, a great solution if you do not want people to copy/paste the text of your webpage

Upvotes: 4

Brian

Reputation: 15706

Not trying to be rude, but why do people keep asking this? If you want people to be able to see the information, then you cannot prevent them from copying it. Any kind of javascript nonsense to prevent right-clicking or selection or whatever else will not stop determined thieves and will annoy legitimate users.

Upvotes: 25

Paddy

Reputation: 33867

The short answer is that you can't (easily) do this - if it's visible in the browser then it is obtainable somehow. This is particularly the case if you are just displaying text.

Upvotes: 2

shinkou

Reputation: 5154

No, AFAIK, there is no way you can achieve that. Unless you're building the whole thing in Flash or other non-HTML plugin contents.

Upvotes: 2

how to restrict user to copy web content

Answers (14)

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