Some of the sites out there seem to think that all their visitors want to do is copy their stuff and they come up with some really irritating idea’s to try to prevent the text/images from being copied.
One such method that I hit today is used by The CartoonistGroup.com site. They have put a javascript mouse over that changes the cartoon to another image that says “CopyNo.com” in a crossed circle.
It took me literally 5 seconds to copy the cartoon to my system inspite of the ‘protections’. (Select the pic, Right-click, choose view selection source, and copy the url, open in a new window) All it did was annoy me. If you think thats technical, just turn off java-script in your browser and the protection is off…
A lot of people like moving their mouse over what they are reading and its quite irritating to have the pic change to another when you are scrolling down…
If you treat all your visitors like criminals who are barely held in check from ripping you off then they are infact going to go out of their way to do it. If you treat them like normal people maybe one in a 1000 will copy the cartoon and post it on their site. And you know what. It doesn’t matter. Its free publicity for the artist and site.
I do agree that hotlinking is not that great. In that case they are using your bandwidth and you are not getting any benefit out of it. However then also you have other options, myconfinedspace.com/ for example allows you to hotlink to images on their server but puts a watermark on them. If you visit the site directly then you don’t see any watermarks on the images .
Putting a watermark on a image when its copied is ok, putting silly java-script/other useless technologies is not ok. Worse comes to worse I can always take a screenshot of the page and then cut paste the image from that and use it. Think about it.
You are not preventing people from copying your stuff. All you are doing is annoying your customers.
– Suramya