Question

I’m a Web Designer, and I have this client who runs a paid subscription blog site that has sensative content that he does not want copied and shared (hence the paid subscription).

I’ve recently been able to successfully disable all ability to copy the content from the actual webpages (using a wordpress plugin, and also targeting some elements using css -webkit-user-select set to none)

But more recently I’ve become aware that you are still able to copy and paste all of the content if the user views the webpage using Safari’s Reader. Is there anyway at all to diable the user’s ability to copy text from inside Reader?

I appreciate any feedback and help you can send my way!

Thanks!

Answer 1

You may try to implement various “tricks” to disabling copying. They have basically to do with preventing default actions when click-dragging to select text (google for jQuery preventDefault). You bind an action an then preventDefault on the event when the action is triggered.

You may also attemp to prevent-defaut some keystokes like cmd-c and cmd-a

But… as the page is delivered to the browser the text is on the user’s machine. So all the techniques above can be circumvented.

In some browsers the tricks above may not work. Or, a smart user, may open the page source and extract the text.

You may go further, rendering the text to image server-side.

But a motivated user may rewrite by hand the text…

Conclusion: you can make more difficult for the average user to copy text. It’s impossible to avoid it completely.

Hope this helps…