Defeating the purpose.

In the current time of copyright lawsuits and 'intellectual property' (I HATE that term), there's protecting your work, and there's being stupid.

Part of the problem, I think, stems from the fact that a lot of people just do not understand what a copyright is. Now, I'm not pretending I do, but I do understand the fact that if you want to copyright something, you don't just put a little 'c' on it, you don't mail it to yourself, and you don't plaster all kinds of watermarks on it. You get a lawyer and get a legal freakin' copyright document on it. I don't care what it is.

The biggest issue I see with this on a daily basis is when someone disables right-clicking on their website in an effort to keep people from stealing their stuff. This is about the lamest attempt at information protection I am aware of. Not only that, but it disables a large amount of functionality that makes browsing the web so much easier and a much richer experience.

Let's take as an example, realgreenlawns.com. (Gee, no idea why I'd be surfing there...) Right click is disabled, and when you attempt to do so, you are given a popup dialog box with a copyright notice in it. Somehow I doubt very seriously that their site is registered with an actual copyright document, but I digress. (And I could be wrong.) Now, most browsers today come with some sort of mouse gesture navigation system. This works by drawing a line or curve on the screen with the mouse, while holding the right mouse button down. This is effectively broken on RealGreenLawns, due to the copyright notice. For me, who uses mouse navigation almost exclusively, the site is very annoying to browse. Not only that, but most of the other functions I use, like bookmarking, sending links or opening links in new windows, are also based on right-click. My browsing speed is cut dramatically on this site.

Finally, I have to point out that were my intentions less than honorable, and I actually did want to copy the material, there are a multitude of ways for me to do so, that do not involve right-clicking. A simple click on the file > save as command gets me the HTML page, plus a neatly organized folder with all the images, stylesheets and java scripts that make up the page. I do better with that than I would with any right-click. I can also use the left mouse button and just drag content to the desktop. Yes, it's that easy. So, essentially, they've protected nothing.

I see this a lot. What people fail to understand is that you can't solve a human problem by throwing technology at it, and vice versa. Disabling right-clicking defeats both the purposes of copyright protection, and enhancing the web-browsing experience. There are much better methods for both.