Question

Is there a way to track if my javascript code is being used on another site?

I work for a software development company and although I’m not a developer as such I do get involved with some of the more simple Javascript requests we get from our customers.

However, sometimes our customers want to see the Javascript working before agreeing to pay for it. My problem here is that although they are not going to be very technical they may have enough knowledge to look at the page source and effectively ‘steal’ the script.

Can I either prevent them from doing this or add some kind of tracking to my code somewhere so if they do a simple copy / paste then I can receive notification somehow of the script being used on another site?

Thank you

Answer 1

A few things you can do:

• Obfuscate your code so it’ll be harder to find out what to copy for non technical people.
• Add a line that checks the domain name of the page and throws an exception or does some other trick to terminate if the domain is not your demo server.
• Add an Ajax query to your server to validate that the script is allowed to run and terminate if there is no validation.

All said here will only protect against non-technical people. Javascript is an interpreted language and as such the entire code is sent to the browser. A skilled programmer will know to go around your blockings.