[thelist] browserindependent copy protection

[Ben Henick]

On Mon, 26 Nov 2001, Øyvind Vestavik wrote:

> I am publishing copyright-protected material over html/http.
> I'm wondering if there is a way to prevent users from copying or saving
> my html-pages or pictures etc  once it is rendered in a browser?? And it
> has to be something that is hounored by all browsers, eg in some
> standard. (Equivlent to the No-Cache..)
>
> Does anyone have any ideas on this? Or can you maybe point me to some
> resources??

Once the work is live and linked, it's protected (loosely) by copyright
statute... but once it's on the Web, there's no way to guarantee that it
cannot be distributed without your knowledge.

Adobe is marketing some sort of e-book technology, as are a couple of
other companies.  However, no clear standard has evolved and w3c does not
to the best of my knowledge have anything on a solid Recommendation track
(in no small part, I am sure, because there is a large constituency that
would consider such a standard to be contradictory to the w3c's mission).

Even in the case of the "saveless" PDF that Martin suggested, there is
absolutely nothing to stop a reasonably savvy user from selecting "Save
Target As" from their context menu.  And no, disabling right-click won't
help here, either.  *chuckle*

Instead, one has to take a sort of "social engineering" approach - by
charging for the content in the first place.  There's certainly nothing
wrong with providing summaries/abstracts for the audience, and if handled
properly could foreseeably INCREASE hits even though the content is being
charged-for.  People tend to associate more value with something they have
to pay for.

But the act of just putting it up in-toto and free-of-charge will not help
matters given the current availability of protection schemes.


-- 
Ben Henick
Web Author At-Large              Managing Editor
http://www.io.com/persist1/      http://www.digital-web.com/
persist1 at io.com                  bmh at digital-web.com
--
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