Did You Know Allowing Right Clicks Promotes Stealing?

Every minute of the day some website somewhere is the victim of digital content theft. This content could be the content of a review, a news story, an article, or even sales copy that a website owner slaved over for weeks or even paid for. Lets not forget the graphics on the website either. Graphics are the most common digital theft of all.

The sad thing is it is so easy for the digital thieves to get the digital content. All they have to do is highlight, right click, select copy, and there you go the content from your website is now in their possession to do what they want with it.

Webmasters all over the world are starved for content on their websites. While it may be true that article directories such as this one have helped, but did you know these digital thieves even steal content from the article directories as well? They sure do.

Now there are even a few programs that can download a whole website and with just a few clicks convert the downloaded content to appear to be original content on another website. So what can we do about it?

There are several scripts a webmaster can use that will block the use of right clicking on a web page. Most of these are JavaScript or cgi scripts that do disable the right click process. Some will even display a predefined popup stating that right clicking has been disabled.

Well that's great but what about the dishonest webmaster that just goes to his View source menu option within his browser? There is no simple answer to this problem. Some webmasters use escape encoding after they have coded their html before uploading to their websites. This is not failsafe as there are utilities that will also decode and unescape the garbled mess that they see in view source. Still it at least it thwarts most of the copy and paste digital thieves.

Developers in web 2.0 technologies proclaim to making advances in stopping digital theft, but the techniques are still way early in development and not stable enough for the plethora of web browsers in use today.

So for now the best we as webmasters can do is to use one of available JavaScript and even go so far as to escape encode for added protection. Hopefully in the near future this problem will be history as the web developers of today put their heads together and diligently work to solve the problem.