onYesterday, I was looking through the Wordpress plugin archive and I found one that was actually released that day. It was called Houdini. It seemed interesting (I always judge books by their covers :P) so I took a look. What I saw.... shocked me. To quote the description:
The fact is the internet is open can lead to theft especially to content stealing and plagarism.
Until now, there was very little to discourage and deter this serious crime. Yes content theft and plagarism is a crime in some jurisdictions.
You cannot rely on others or the authorities to continue to police the internet as they do not have enough resources. You need to protect your content and deter this theft.
The basic form of content theft is to copy and paste your content to another medium.
Well Houdini, prevents this using a little known special algorithm that prevents copying by making the selected text that is targeted by the perps to be copied, to disappear! Yes disappear!!! The only way to recover is to reload the page in the web browser. If they try again, the content disappears again. As long as they keep trying to select and copy your content, the content will disappear before they can get a chance to execute the copy command!
After a few unsuccessful attempts, the theives will move on to a easier target.
Your safe!
PHK Corporation
....WHAT?!?!?!? Nevermind the author's poor English skills, what are they talking about? It's not technically possible to prevent content theft and this odd little method will annoy normal blog visitors (who are probably less technical than the evil plagiarists) who just want to copy a sentence. Honestly, saying this is like claiming that you wrote a virus that prevents people from turning off their computers. I've already thought of 5 ways to circumvent this kind of "protection":
- Go old fashioned and turn off JavaScript. Yep, the script is rendered useless.
- More advanced content thieves likely don't just go around to random blogs and copy/paste off of them. They write screen scrapers, small programs that visit sites and download specific parts of the site. As these do not render pages and simply download from them, the script isn't even seen by the scraper.
- Due to the nature of the Internet, anyone, and I mean anyone, can see the source code of a website. It's done differently in different web browsers, but it's always pathetically easy and, as it simply shows HTML code instead of parsing anything, no scripts are run.
- RSS. Syndication feeds are normally viewed in feed readers with little to no JavaScript interpreter. Script bypassed.
- There's this cool little button on most keyboards that says "Print Screen". Even on the keyboards that don't have it, there's usually a key combination that achieves the same effect. It takes a picture of whatever's on the screen. No selection occurs and yet the thief has a copy of your article. They do, however, have to retype it, so this keeps the lazy thieves out.
This is fun. Does anyone else see any other ways that this plugin fails? Feel free to share!
Anyway, if there's something that's so important that you have to go to extreme measures to prevent people from plagiarizing it, you probably shouldn't be putting it on the internet. It's annoying, but the sad fact is that the nature of the Internet prevents copy protection from being possible. The only way to prevent copy theft is to prevent people from accessing the files in the first place, which would only be possible by not putting the files on the Internet in the first place. There are ways of circumventing certain methods of content thievery (like using a CAPTCHA would block out screen scrapers.... and severely annoy your readers) but they aren't worth it. Just stick with the old fashioned method of dealing with plagiarists: tattle to Google so their PageRank drops into the negative values. :P
EDIT: I was going to email the author of the plugin a link to this post, but by the time this post came out (my pending queue is annoying sometimes), someone had already told the author about the plugin's problem. We're currently having some fun arguments :P:
JAN
27
Comments