monley......

I posed your question to a multimedia pro. Here is his response:
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If it is truly HTML....static OR dynamically displayed out of a database...there is no way to protect your text copy. The reason is that you can cut and paste as a matter of default functionality in a browser.

The other reason is that HTML and most other web languages are OPEN SOURCE projects. This means that all the code, source, and usage specs are public.

There are way you could design a flash file to protect certain content but even Flash’s source code is open source...it’s hard to protect data on the Internet after a user is already viewing it.

The only real way to protect content is to set up a pay per use or subscription based site. With this in place you can charge the user BEFORE they get to use the content...and that usage would be based on a username and password and that usage could be tracked or limited in whatever way you need it to be.

Your best bet here is to set up a Flash template that reads and displays custom data from a data base...and that content is fee based....and restricted by username and password.
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Am happy to connect you with this person if interested.

I've seen several sites where the right click menu of IE (which allows copy) was disabled and replaced with a dialog window. This was likely done with a simple JavaScript, but might only work in IE and wont prevent the keyboard shortcut CTL+C. It's a deterrent at least

Being a eLearning developer for close to 6 years now I can tell you that there ARE ways to prevent content from being copied or cached but you need to do some coding around it.

Particularly with Flash you can build an architecture in which the data is dynamically fetched from a database at runtime (to avoid data caching when used with XML or other data sources) and disable printing by disabling the print and when the focus is lost of the application you can detect this in Flash and black out the screen.

Now as far as print screen and paste goes - there are ways to null out the clipboard on the lost focus event and get away with that too.

So to answer this question - yes there are ways you can protect the content and I am confident about this - just that it would involve a fair amount of programming. If you need advice feel free to contact me.

I am not aware of any foul proof way to prevent someone from copying your content; however, you might want to consider using www.copyscape.com. You can post their copyright notice at the bottom of all your pages and you can search to see if anyone has copied your content. This will at least allow you to contact the person and write them a strong opposition letter reminding them of copyright laws.

It is most certainly possible, just a lot of programming experience needed.

quote:

Originally posted by Sheldon:
I recently saw an example, from a testing company called BrainBench, that did not allow me to even copy and paste the text. Unfortunately, I don't know how they did it, but at least this proves that it's possible with HTML.

Sheldon