I’m not getting into the ethics of free vs pay and theft or any of that. Comments on that matter will be deleted on sight.
Earlier in the year I remarked on how right-click protection doesn’t work. Right-click disabling is a form of obfuscation protection. By hiding the normal methods to perform actions, you are ‘protected.’ You’re not. I told you so then, and I tell you now. If it’s on the internet, it can and will get ‘stolen.’
Pretty recently I got into a ‘tiff’ with the guy who wrote a WordPress plugin to disable right click. A user had a problem and bitched (generically). I told him that the plugin worked well for what it was, but that disabling doesn’t really do much. The plugin author accused me of trolling (incorrect, I was attempted to start a conversation with the user to sort out why he needed the plugin, and to then help determine a solution – which is my volunteer job). Of course, that meant I wanted to see how this guy’s product worked. I went and grabbed WP Protect and determined that you can block right-click, image drag and text selection. He doesn’t block CTRL-A, though, so I could easily select all and move on. (Actually you CAN block ctrl-A, per Disable ctrl + n and other ctrl + key combinations in JavaScript, but remember that on a Mac it’s Apple-A and you have to take all that into consideration.)
My point remains valid that the technical code for doing these things is not complete, doesn’t work for all situations, and puts a burden on you. And it doesn’t work! If you printed up a newspaper, it’s easy for people to copy your work. We have a copy machine, a scanner, and scissors. If you send out a DVD, we can rip it at home and pass it around to our friends (which is legal actually, so long as you’re not selling it as your own work – see mix tapes, yo). Why is stopping copying bad for your users? If I want to send someone a link to your article, there are two things I want to do. First, I copy your URL. Second I want to copy your title (and maybe an excerpt to illustrate a point). By killing right click, you made it a royal pain to SHARE your work. And if you’re online, you want people to share. The same goes with DVDs, mix tapes etc. Sharing is how we tell people “I really like this!” You’ve shot that down and will lose customers.
Apropos of all this, the New York Times decided they needed to charge for media. This makes sense, as they charge for a newspaper. I have no objection to paying for media (traditional or not) at all. What did The NYT do? They put up a paywall. You now have to pay to get in. Kind of.
Come March 28, you’ll only be able to read 20 articles per month for free. After that, you’ll need a digital subscription, which costs $3.75 per week for Web and mobile phone access, $5 per week for Web and tablet access and $8.75 per week for access on the web, phones, tablets, TimesReader and the Chrome Web app. Print subscribers get all this stuff at no extra charge. (New York Times Paywall: A Small Change That Seems Big – By Jared Newman, PCWorld Mar 17, 2011 12:00 PM)
And then there’s a catch. If you go to their site via Google, Facebook or Twitter, it’s ‘free’.
Essentially, the New York Times doesn’t want to charge you for its content. It wants to charge you for the delivery mechanism, whether it’s through the Website, the iPhone app, the tablet app or the TimesReader software. That’s the best approach, because content is abundant on the Internet. An elegant tablet app is worth more than the individual stories within.
The problem for the Times, and the reason a lot of people should shrug off the paywall, is that people don’t necessarily need major media gatekeepers to provide the delivery mechanism. A recent study by Pew Internet found that 75 percent of people who find news online get it through e-mail or social networks. (Here’s a fitting anecdote: a friend alerted me to the Times’ paywall announcement by e-mail.) (New York Times Paywall: A Small Change That Seems Big – By Jared Newman, PCWorld Mar 17, 2011 12:00 PM)
Not to mention that you can overcome the technical aspects of their wall pretty easily. The Times built their paywall with some simple Javascript, which can be tweaked pretty fast. And it cost them $40 million. (New Media Barbarians Breach New York Times Paywall in Hours – By Erik Sherman | March 22, 2011)
What the NYT is learning pretty quickly is that hiding your content, or putting up barriers, isn’t effective. Nor will their plan succeed because of the same reason we still have people out there who can crack your DVD and DVD players. If you build it, we can unbuild it and share it and there you go. If you don’t want people to read your articles for free, you stop putting them online. That’s it. If you email me an article, I can email it to my friends (copy & paste) after all.
I hate to say it, but once it’s out there, it’s done. Hiding it doesn’t help, because you either chase people off who can’t find it (and who would have paid) or you make people smarter who steal it (and they wouldn’t have paid anyway). We need a culture shift to make this all ‘profitable’ as well as something the end users are willing to pay for. We’re not there yet. I’m not entirely sure we’re all that different from where we were when I was in high school, though. The only major change is how easy it is to find the information to steal. That’s why I think the problem isn’t the technology, but the mentality.
It’s hard to see a future where we can run a business like a newspaper, make it profitable, and convince people to pay for it. Yes, part of this is our own fault for providing information for free all this time, but the other part is the abject denial that this was an issue until it was too late. I certainly cannot advocate cable TV’s method of charging, but perhaps a restructuring of sites, so you can only see domain foo.com if your ISP pays a fee to foo.com (and you can access it by telling your ISP you want to ‘see’ foo.com as well). Lifting the model wholesale strikes me as a terrible idea, but the idea of charging the provider, not the end user makes some sense.
After all, basic network TV is ‘free’ in the US, isn’t it? Well, that’s another post. The point here is that the methods we’re using now to stop ‘theft’ isn’t working. So how do you protect your intellectual property and attract readers?
Comments
One response to “Obfuscation Obtuseness”
You didn’t mention in either this article, or the previous one, one of the simplest way around the JavaScript “no right-click” or “no copy” scripts. Browse without JavaScript turned on. I use NoScript on Firefox, I never have a problem with not being able to right-click. I turn NoScript off on certain sites, they don’t do stupid things like trying to block right-clicks.
As for protecting “intellectual property” (a term I despise for reasons listed on other sites, including the GNU site), I don’t. Material I put online I expressly say is free to use (with some conditions, depending on the material). If someone rips it off, there isn’t much I can do is there.
And attracting users, well, I’m not trying so much now, but I think you’ve said it well in other posts, good content is key.