explaining why disabling right click is stupid

[indhyper]

No matter what methods you use to protect your image the user can just go PrtScn and then paste the screenshot into a paint program and crop out the image. That even works on madpilots table method!

[indhyper]

Originally Posted by heist

users have no right-click to do things like "Bookmark this page" or "Send a friend a link to this page"

You don't work for Seek do you?

[kingaman]

Originally Posted by tuna

The right click thing is general is bad deal for all. You can't dictate to people how they will access and use your web site. If you do they will just get frustrated and leave. It's just like giving poor customer service in the Real World.

sounds like a client I had who wanted a popup to open in the botton right corner of the screen!

the best method is watermark the image. as temp said the only foolproof method is to not put it on the internet, but watermarking makes the image pretty much unusable for most applications.
another method could be to embed the image in a flash file. not the best from an accessibility point, but it once again makes it a bit harder to get the image... and even then harded to get it in a usable format.
but then again if the person knows about the screenshot function nothing will work!

[jadeia]

I had to answer this question specifically to a client recently. They are a W.A. company in the business of designing leather furniture and want to protect their designs from copycat companies mostly in Asia.

They asked if we could prevent the right-click save as feature and my honest and simple answer was "Ctrl-Prt Scr".

We then went into a more detailed discussion about legitimate ways to protect images on the internet.

Edit: BTW The best image copy protection system I have seen would be iStock. It's simple and effective on most of their images. As already stated though, anything on the internet is fair game and all we can do is do our best to protect images. At the end of the day, if you don't want it available to anyone, don't stick it on a web page

2nd Edit: And yes calling your clients stupid is usually not very good

[indhyper]

Oh, another way to get images out of the website is to just save the whole page and most browsers save the associated files with the HTML in a folder.

The trouble is that images have to be downloaded and stored on your computer before they are displayed, and then the images have to be written to your video card's RAM to be able to see them. So the only way to control how your images are used is to stop them being downloaded in the first place.

[heist]

Originally Posted by indhyper

You don't work for Seek do you?

nope, whysat?

[indhyper]

Ever tried to bookmark or email a Seek URL?

[tealou]

Basically I go all "lawyery" on them and say that I understand their point of view, but the cost of development time outweighs the benefits, and that whilst I will do what they ask if push came to shove, I strongly advise them, as their web guru/life consultant/babysitter that its not a good idea.

I find that this helps.

Usually the reactionary things like disabling right click etc comes from a friend of a friend who said that they got something from google images... so just do your best to alleviate their fears about copyright infringement etc and explain, I guess.

[jadeia]

Basically the right-click thing is a placebo. I prefer to be honest with my clients, but then it's there choice in the end.

[kay]

Well, as it turns out (and as I suspected) this was the photographer being pissy... all I had to say was that disabling right click prevents people from doing other things like bookmarking and printing and they totally agreed it was a bad idea. They're gonna beat the photographer up and it will all be good.

Interesting thread though!