Control Your Content the Right Way

We here at Port80 think that site owners should have some control over their content access, particularly when people fetch it in ways that steal bandwidth or co-opt brand. However, it is pretty easy to go overboard with content protection. Considering that you can easily protect an image using JavaScript to provide an anti-right click script.

<img src=”swineflu.jpg” oncontextmenu=”alert(’Copyright 2009 Big News Agency’); return false;”>

However, this is easily defeated. 

You might even try a trick where you put a transparent pixel image over a protected image.  Then the user can access their context menu but when they save an image they get some blank item. An example of this technique can be found on David Walsh’s Programming Blog.  While this scheme is actually employed at a few photo sharing sites it is silly and easily broken, but still somewhat useful for those with no other means of content protection.

Now let’s be real.  If the person wants your image it is easy to go spelunking in your cache and grab it. You could use some interesting tricks with Flash and Java applets to keep the actual bits of the image out of cache, but then you are starting to get into to the “what’s the point” zone.  (Image Stealer): “I’ll show them, I’ll just screen capture that baby.”

So we’ve seen this pattern for image protection for years, but what we haven’t seen is this particular level of silliness in content protection.  Sitepoint exposes some folks who actually make their content difficult to highlight because they use script to put it together dynamically on screen.  Of course this causes SEO trouble, accessibility issues, and just pisses users off.  But hey why stop there… we can use Flash or something to load text in and make it so we have to print and that’s it. 

Snark aside, we really do believe site owners should have control over their sites, but let’s understand that when you start angering your legitimate users you’ve likely gone too far.

Port80