Locking Down Your Content

Webmasters are forever trying to prevent theft of their content. Below is a list of possible solutions that you may want to implement on your website, depending on your content and prospective viewer.

No right click

The no right click prevents the casual browser who sees your artwork as they are browsing pages. It does not prevent them if they use images.google.com to find it, or if they know code, use a web copier bot or search their cache.

Tutorial on simple No Right Click Script

Water Marking Images

Watermarking images with your logo, copyright, etc can be an effective deterrent to people who believe the image is fair game unless marked. Others will take it anyway and remove the copyright. Some have made copyright watermarrks that do not interfere with the image much, yet ecompases the entire image.

Tutorial on Watermarking Images in Photoshop

Webpage encryption

This is a program which will scramble and encrypt your page so that anyone who looks at th3e source code will find it difficult to discern. The level of encryption can vary depending on the program you buy. I believe pages can still be copied and pasted into an editor.

Masking images

Images are placed as backgrounds in a 1 cell X 1 cell table which is set to the size of the image. Inside the cell is a 1 pixel by 1 pixel transparent gif resized the the size of the image which will display behind it. When a user right clicks they can save the image, however it will be the transparent gif. This will prevent the casual surfer from saving after a right click, or they will save, but will not get the correct5 images. Drawbacks are when they save more then one, they will be tipped off because the file names are identical for each image. Also the user who collects images from the temporary internet files will still find them. Web copiers will still be able to obtain them.

Slicing Images

Images can be sliced in a program like Image Ready (comes with Photoshop) so that the user who right clicks only takes part of the image unbeknownst to them. The person who looks in the source code for the name and tried to locate it in the page or temporary is still faced with partial images, unless they know what they are looking at. The smart user might try to copy the page into a WYSIWIG editor, but the trouble of recovering the images is far more difficult for the casual browsing visitor. It takes more of a professional to reconstruct the image. The web copiers can take the pages and contents, but using them outside the page they will be faced with reconstructive surgery.

Tutorial on how to slice up a large image in photoshop and Image ready

Disable the Internet Explorer Image tool Bar

With the IE5 and higher you get the image explorer tool bar that will tempt people to save images and print. This broswer supplies a nice tool bar in the upper left corner of the image when you mouse over the image. This tool bar can be disabled with a simple attribute added to your image tags.

Article on the Developing webs Bulletin Board on how to disable the tool bar

.htaccess file

The htaccess file determines who can browse the site as well as what files they can open. With the HTaccess file you can send robots to a specific page only. You can also specify which bots are good bots and which ones are bad so that you can block web copiers. There is a thread on this forum about good bots and bad bots and includes not only an htaccess file, but how you can limit clients from browsing your pages and encourage search engines to index and follow.
This will prevent the professional content thieves from taking your entire site with all the contents, including restricted folders, email lists etc. This is not geared to the casual browsing theft.

Information on setting up an .htaccess file for bad bot prevention

No Caching

Each and every image and page content is stored in your temporary internet files. You can prevent storage of your page content and images in temporary images files or your cache by using a meta tag for the IE and an onload body statement for netscape.
For IE:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="-1">

For Netscape:

In your body tag include this:Code:
onLoad="if ('Navigator' == navigator.appName) document.forms[0].reset();"