Recently one of our friends pulled all her articles off her website, in reaction to some people copying them without authorisation, posting them elsewhere, and in some cases, changing them. Today, I found all the articles posted back, accompanied by a script which supposedly disables the right-click menu, replacing it with a notice about the articles being copyrighted. I decided to do a little test on how effective this technique was, and discovered that it was even less effective than I had previously supposed. I rarely use Windows; my main computer is a Mac and I also use a PC running Linux. The main browsers you can get for the Mac are Safari (and a derivative, OmniWeb), Mozilla (and two derivatives, Firefox and Camino), Opera and Internet Explorer. Linux has Konqueror, Mozilla (and three derivatives, Firefox and the now little-used Galeon and Epiphany) and Opera.
Not one of the Mac browsers actually allow the blocking of the right click (most Macs only have one mouse button, and you use the Ctrl button with the mouse to do a right click). Mozilla and Firefox did display Sara's warning, and then displayed the right-click menu. On Opera, Safari, OmniWeb, Camino and Internet Explorer, the mechanism has simply no effect.
On Linux, the trick works only in Epiphany. (Its JavaScript control facility is very limited, but this browser is being sidelined because of the recent release of Firefox.) It works in Firefox and Mozilla the same way it works on their Mac equivalents. On Konqueror and Opera, it doesn't work. Whether this is because the browsers are written deliberately to stop right-click trapping or simply because they are too basic, I didn't check. This nonetheless leaves right-click trapping a trick that works only on one popular browser.
I didn't check it in Firefox or Mozilla for Windows, but I presume they have the same facilities as their Mac equivalents. K-Meleon, a Windows-based Mozilla derivative, also fails to trap the right click.
I suspect that authors of other open-source (and possibly even commercial) browsers will include facilities to ban right-click trapping, and rightly so, because most people in the open-source community resent the notion of someone restricting what I can do with my computer. (I expect MSIE won't, however; MS has never cared much about their customers' freedom.) As I pointed out earlier, the right mouse button does more than just copy text - it is also some people's habitual way of moving back a page. People will simply find it an unawnted annoyance, especially if they used the right mouse button without any intention of copying the article. I do hope this doesn't catch on.
as-salamu 'alaykum,
Not only does "no right-click" not work, none of these schemes to protect public content work. At most, they are just an annoyance to anyone with any PC savvy. This is because the bottom line is that if the content can be displayed in your browser, then it has already made it to your PC, thus it's only a matter of finding it. As far as "no right-clicking", it's very easy to get around. Just get the complete URL of the file that you want to download and paste it into an HTML link on your own PC. Once you load that page, you can right-click on it all you want. If the webmaster makes the URL invisible, it's easy enough to find by searching the cache of your browser. I'm not a hacker, but I have done such things to get around annoyances that webmasters have set up for no good reason...especially when I have legal and legitimate rights to the files. For example, there's a PAY Islamic site that allows you to download MP3 lectures, nasheeds, etc., but for some reason they used to have right-click disabled, even though I was allowed to download the content using their left-click script. I have no idea why they did this, but it only took me a few minutes to bypass anyway. I always use GetBot to download the files all at once, that way I can start a bunch of big downloads before I go to bed...and they're done in the morning. Verdict: If it's out there for everyone to see, they can get it and keep it.
Opera has been designed to override or ignore such UI hijackings. This is a balancing act, we want both a rich programming environment and good accessibility and usability (hassle-free browsing whoever you are and whatever you use), and the latter is more important to our users. So much of our functionality lies in our context (right-click) menus, we can't afford to lose that. On the other hand other users depend on our ability to do advanced interactive applications, and it is hard to separate good scripts (that make the user's life easier) from bad script (that makes it harder) and we're still working on making the perfect mix.
Until then you have Quick Preferences > Enable JavaScript (F12 followed by J in the default keyboard setup).
Salaams
Thanks for the info. I guess I'm taking everything off then. OS people can resent what they want all they like. I'm tired of being pushed around by haters.
Salaam;
First you didn't like the fact that she removed the content, and then when she put it back, you spend a considerable amount of time destroying Umm Zaid's sense of security and to let other people know exactly how right-click banning can be overcome. What was the point of this whole exercise? What do you really prove?
It's not always a matter of being right about a thing. If having that content online was as important to you as you said it was, then why not say to yourself, even if it doesn't work, I won't point that out, I don't want the content to be removed once more.
You had to have realized that the end result of your post, regardless of whatever intentions you may have had, would be in the removal, once more, of the articles in question.
*Most* people *don't* know how to disable right-click banning. *Most* people use PCs with MSIE. No, it wouldn't have worked perfectly, especially with someone as determined as you. But as a deterrant for the vast majority of visitors to her site? I have the feeling it would've been effective.
b: I do think there is a more diplomatic way to express your point of view, it is not right islamicly to think badly of someone's intention, besides, Siraji's blog is one of brother Yusuf's favorait blogs, he even nominated it as the best muslim blog, now I don't think such a person would mean harm to sister Umm Zaid or her blog, he just had information he wanted to share.
Assalamu alaikum, if he wanted to let Umm Zaid know that the right-click thing didn't work, why not email her privately and let her know about it? Why publicly put up on the blog that the right-click thing doesn't work, and then tell people how to subvert it?
This whole copyright thing has, I think, deprived many people of the benefit of Umm Zaid's articles, including myself.
All because people wanted to prove a point, or they think that copyright doesn't apply to Muslims because of "dawa", or whatever.
If the right-click thing doesn't work, your publicly stating so, and then further going on to let people know how to get around it, just further lets people know how to be able to go and steal her work all over again.
It makes me wonder how many potential readers of her work will now not have the honor of benefiting from Umm Zaid's work, all because Muslims choose not to respect copyright law.