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How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

patrick-wied.at

31–40 of 131 posts

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#31
post #4

That demo messed with my eyes. Even though it is interlacing faster than the eye can see for some reason it still felt weird to look at it. Overall, not worth the trouble or the decline in user experience.

Lesson learned: LCD monitors are absolutely horrible at interlacing. And you can, of course, put them back together with one line of JavaScript. As he says, it's futile. People should stop doing this. Yawn.

I am associated with a... certain industry... (ahem) which frequently finds its content reposted (and it wouldn't be right or proper of me to identify any further, but I'm sure it's a moderately generalised problem).

One must be realistic about these things - if we're going to publish things, some people are going to pirate them and that's that. It leaves our control to some degree when we let it loose, regardless of what legal rights we may have. We're going to find them plastered all over Tumblr or TPB or something no matter what we (or Tumblr!) do. That is not necessarily all a negative, especially if it might drive interest and traffic, which may be worth more than any one or two pieces of content for some. If we get enough customers to support ourselves and what we do, that's fine (and we can thank our loyal repeat customers for that; many others are simply not in such a position).

"The invisible wall" might be worth it as a courtesy "please don't save this image" thing, but developer tools exist in browsers, so that really is only a courtesy thing: anything else is a fantasy and nothing else is really workable, but perhaps it presents a sort of reasonable-ish balance, if it doesn't degrade anyone's experience and if people are at least aware we'd prefer that not to happen on balance. I feel the same about any light DRM (for example, for PC gaming, I'd say Steam is fairly "courtesy DRM" compared to its peers, excepting its peers like GOG that have no DRM at all).

(I'm also a reverse-engineer of some experience, so I've found myself analysing others' solutions in other industries quite a lot over the years - it's interesting to look back and see how my own opinions on this matter have evolved from a vehement rejection of any DRM as a matter of principle, to a slightly more nuanced position that it is occasionally not devilspawn but we'd still have a better world without it and anything that may cause users any inconvenience is completely unacceptable.)

Fairly discreet and tasteful watermarking is all we've ever found to be a reasonable solution. What we see when people do repost them, as a result, is more sales - when a few people obviously like what they saw and looked it up. Not a lot, but some. Yay. Have we gained more than we've "lost" (not that we ever had those in the first place)? I don't know, I don't have a crystal ball to guess at events that have never happened, but we've gained some as a result of this, and some is always better than none.

Except those people who edit or crop out the watermarks then reblog them. Fuck those people. That gets right up my nose; there's piracy, and then there's plagiarism, and that's how I interpret that one - it feels like they're taking credit for it (and if they are, that's dangerous: people might think they know what they're doing and get themselves in dangerous situations), or at least they're definitely removing ours, which is irksome particularly when you see a comment thread asking for, as the parlance goes, "sauce" (the source of the content). Those are people who wanted more, dammit, and you cropped out the thing that could have linked them where to get more, and since it's been reposted, they probably don't even know. That's just putting barriers in people's way for no good reason. (Thank you for those few that do reverse image searches in such cases and find us that way anyway, you're heroes. ♥)

Any thoughts?

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#33

So here's a startup idea that can help with that. 1) Build a library for hiding encrypted information inside images. It should be hard to detect (indistinguishable from random) and robust (e.g. survive printing and scanning). 2) Build a web crawler, coupled with a key store. Crawl the internet for images that contain our encrypted info. 3) The copyright owners will be our paying clients. They will display images only…

It seems to me that you've basically described Digimarc®'s business model.

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#34

So here's a startup idea that can help with that. 1) Build a library for hiding encrypted information inside images. It should be hard to detect (indistinguishable from random) and robust (e.g. survive printing and scanning). 2) Build a web crawler, coupled with a key store. Crawl the internet for images that contain our encrypted info. 3) The copyright owners will be our paying clients. They will display images only…

Blizzard does this: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/watermark-screenshots-World...

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#35
It broke my firefox :( First, a popup error message reporting:

SyntaxHighlighter Can't find brush for :jscript

and then the whole browser became unresponsive and needed to be restarted. On the plus side, you've helped Firefox development by discovering a new bug!

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#36

So here's a startup idea that can help with that. 1) Build a library for hiding encrypted information inside images. It should be hard to detect (indistinguishable from random) and robust (e.g. survive printing and scanning). 2) Build a web crawler, coupled with a key store. Crawl the internet for images that contain our encrypted info. 3) The copyright owners will be our paying clients. They will display images only…

You could just use TinEye[1], which looks at the actual image data to find copies. I know some artists use it to track down illegal copying, but I'm not sure how accurate and effective it is.

http://services.tineye.com/TinEyeAlerts

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#37
post #12

How to drive away customers: prioritize your unproven loss of income over making an attractive product. Accuse all your users of copyright infringement.

I really dislike this attitude on HN. You can have great products that make no money because cracks get popular (I have done testing with my own software and know for sure this is the case) and get higher results than the original product listing on google, Adblock, and many other methods thought to be "rights". Even look at music piracy. Pirates did the big labels a favor: small, independent artists can't make a liv…

Regardless of what you believe I am not going to patronize you if you treat me like a thief, likewise I'm going to fight tooth and nail to ensure that I am the one that controls the device I physically own, not a content business.

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#39
post #12

How to drive away customers: prioritize your unproven loss of income over making an attractive product. Accuse all your users of copyright infringement.

I really dislike this attitude on HN. You can have great products that make no money because cracks get popular (I have done testing with my own software and know for sure this is the case) and get higher results than the original product listing on google, Adblock, and many other methods thought to be "rights". Even look at music piracy. Pirates did the big labels a favor: small, independent artists can't make a liv…

Like it or not, you can't do it, so don't waste your time.

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#40
post #27

So here's a startup idea that can help with that. 1) Build a library for hiding encrypted information inside images. It should be hard to detect (indistinguishable from random) and robust (e.g. survive printing and scanning). 2) Build a web crawler, coupled with a key store. Crawl the internet for images that contain our encrypted info. 3) The copyright owners will be our paying clients. They will display images only…

I was under the assumption that image/theme services did that already, especially with website themes? That may be an idea for a copyright troll, btw. Disseminate not-for-commercial-use for free, then charge dozen of thousands of dollars when infringement is found.

I gather there was a distinct suggestion that at least one infamous copyright troll had done something like that because the only place their content had ever been found was on The Pirate Bay, uploaded by them, which they subsequently threatened users for downloading.

(You can guess how well that turned out for them.)

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