How To Copy Protect Web Pages From Data Mining and Theft

The Internet is an amazing resource for information and media and for most, a free library to plagiarize from and re-use for their own purpose. The lure of lucre for paid advertising  has created thousands of web sites with nothing to offer than content stolen form other web sites.

There is not much one can do about this because the popular consensus is that is how it should be, and those supporting that opinion can be found to be the general public who want everything for free, and those who will profit from it. Take for example "search engines" and how they index your web site and information and deliver it to those looking seeking the same. Yes, they provide a free service to the community, but their real motivation is for profit, because search engines like Google are making billions of dollars from mining and reselling your information.

Regardless of the motive, anything published on a web page is open to theft by all and sundry. If you have a product line it will not be original for long, and the product images that you display, will surely be plagiarized by other resellers of those products. Good business strategy encourages one to break boundaries and limitations so ethics will be the first to go, especially when what they need is sitting in front of them displayed on your web page.

Protect With Password

Password protection is provided by most CMS provide member registration and login services and today. The most popular CMS are WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Moodle (in that order) on a cheap and shared hosting service provided on Linux servers. For Windows server users DNN (DotNetNuke) is available. Password protection will restrict access to your proprietary data but it will not prevent those who can log in from sharing that data. More on that later.

Restrict By User-Agent

A "user-agent" is an identification string that is included in the request for a web page. Detecting user-agent and redirecting those that are unwanted can be a useful deterrent. Most people will not realize just how many applications are available for scraping and downloading your web site and media, but there are some strategies that can be employed to prevent most of it.

How you script that detection is up to you and will depend on your web sites backend. But in brief, start with getting the server variable for "user-agent", then compare it to a list of known offenders and if found, redirect that offender to a blank page. Click for the most secure web browsing solution.

Encryption

Another strategy that can be employed is "encryption". Encryption can protect the data and media stored on the server from your web master and web hosting staff, and it can prevent leakage to those who may not have access rights to that information. For example one can check referrer and if it is a direct link and not referred from your doorway pages then redirect them. Either way, if they do not satisfy your criteria, do not decrypt the information. If you can use your domain name as the decryption key your content an media can be domain locked, and even if they do get a copy of the encrypted page, it cannot be displayed anywhere except from your web site. Click for the most secure web encryption solution.

User Identification

Individual users can be identified by the computer that they use. A unique identifier can be defined by obtaining the hard drive serial number or MAC address that is used for the Internet connection. Most of those in the copy protection industry are imitating the ideas of others and only capable of getting a MAC address, which is not ideal because a computer will have a different MAC address for different types of Internet connection, whether it be LAN, Modem, Wi-Fi, etc. Click for the most secure user identification solution.

Copy Protection

So far we have discussed the means of preventing unauthorized access to your web pages, and now need to discuss what can be done to protect them while open and on display. First, let's identify some methods of obtaining a copy while on display:

• Page "save" will download and save the text and/or include all media displayed on the page.
• Right-click menu can be used to select and copy images and text to the clipboard.
• Right-click for "properties" will provide the web location of any media displayed on the page.
• The Print option will send the page to the printer or a printer-driver for conversion to numerous file types such as PDF, etc.

You may have noticed that the "right-click" menu is mentioned a couple of times, so you might assume that disabling right-click will protect your media. But think again, because the same menu options are available from the browser toolbar. You will not be alone thinking that because thousands of WordPress users use one of a number of "content protection " plugins that are a clone of each other, and all they do is disable the right click menu. Yes, just more plagiarism and what those monkey-brains do is download someone else's "open-source" plugin,  rename its functions and slightly re-arrange their order in the script... voila, yet another ripped off plugin that they can use to promote an unrelated enterprise like web hosting or SEO services.

When we talk about "copy protection" we mean methods of preventing all copy full stop, completely, without ado, and methods that cannot be exploited. Methods that can be and should be employed by those who need to protect their livelihood and mission critical data.

Click for the most secure copy protection solutions.