- Whilst the world is exploring the concept of justice

Author: Mary Markell 

The internet is the best place if you want to steal content. It makes it really easy to copy any information you see on webpages, whether it is text, images, media or .pdf files etc. A lot of web designers or webmasters are spending hours using various techniques to protect their webpage content. Well, the fact is that there's no method that can effectively protect your website content from copying.

When you view a webpage that means all content from this particular webpage is already on your hard drive. All the words, images, source code, media files are already downloaded to your temporary internet files folder on your pc. It's a matter of simply moving those files to another location on your hard drive and you've got all the content from that website.

So, whether you like it or not the news is there's no way to prevent a skilled and determined thief from stealing your content. Here's is my advice: If you have something that's really valuable and don't want people to make use of it without your permission, then just don't upload it on the web.

So called "Protection methods"

Disabling the text copy. Lots of webmasters use this method hoping that it will protect the webpage's content from being copied. This method is very easy to implement. You just add a small java script code which prevents the website visitor from highlighting any text on the web page and make use of the -Copy- function.

And what happens if your visitor has disabled java script? Or if they simply view the source code of the webpage from the browser menu? My advice: Just don't bother using this method, it will only annoy your visitors.

A very popular method is the "No right click" script. This is a java script that disables the right mouse click on webpages so that visitors will not be able to look at the web page source code. My advice: never disable the right mouse click. Again, you will only succeed in annoying your website visitors.

Another popular method is the HTML stripping method. The idea is to remove all spaces in your source code so that it looks like a big long line. That way it will make it harder for people to read it and will also make your webpages download faster. But what happens if you want to edit that webpage yourself? My advice: Don't even think about using this method especially if you keep updating your webpages often.

By far the most useless method of protecting your content is to convert all your text to images. I've seen only a few websites implementing this technique. It will take you years to convert all text, you will confuse the search engines (I doubt you will ever rank in any search engine) because they will not be able to read any text, and if someone desperately wants your content all it takes is to sit down and retype it manually!

There are other similar so called content protection methods, but I firmly believe that there's no point to try to protect your content using any of them. It's just a waste of time. If someone really wants your website content, no matter you do, there's no way to prevent them from stealing.