Copying Chapters

NiQuinn

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I just checked and, apparently, I can copy a chapter and paste it in a word document file. I just thought it would be nice to somehow disable copying posted content to dissuade pirates from copying a story and posting it somewhere else. Of course, someone might have the patience to copy a story word for word but it would be nice to not make it easy for them.

Or, am I being paranoid?
 

Tony

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I just checked and, apparently, I can copy a chapter and paste it in a word document file. I just thought it would be nice to somehow disable copying posted content to dissuade pirates from copying a story and posting it somewhere else. Of course, someone might have the patience to copy a story word for word but it would be nice to not make it easy for them.

Or, am I being paranoid?

You're not paranoid but there are soooooo many ways to bypass this feature even if it was implemented. There are plugins out there for regular users which can easily bypass this. As for bots, it's even easier for them.

So it's basically annoying regular users and not really stopping anyone from stealing the chapters. I've seen this feature on a few translations site before and in my head, I'm like "Why? It doesn't work at all. It doesn't stop bots and it annoys REAL users at the same time"

So yeah... sorry... :sweating_profusely:
 

NiQuinn

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You're not paranoid but there are soooooo many ways to bypass this feature even if it was implemented. There are plugins out there for regular users which can easily bypass this. As for bots, it's even easier for them.

So it's basically annoying regular users and not really stopping anyone from stealing the chapters. I've seen this feature on a few translations site before and in my head, I'm like "Why? It doesn't work at all. It doesn't stop bots and it annoys REAL users at the same time"

So yeah... sorry... :sweating_profusely:
Thanks for the info. I was kind of confused about whether there was an existing way to stop people from copying text content. Interesting to know that there are more ways to actually go around it. Also, no need to be sorry. It's just the internet being the internet.
 

Tony

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Thanks for the info. I was kind of confused about whether there was an existing way to stop people from copying text content. Interesting to know that there are more ways to actually go around it. Also, no need to be sorry. It's just the internet being the internet.

Yeah, it's pretty simple to find too. Here are some for Chrome:

 

NiQuinn

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Yeah, it's pretty simple to find too. Here are some for Chrome:

 

0xReki

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What could be done is automatically hide content from bots, Cloudflare has that feature (Scrape Shield / Server Side Excludes). I'm just not sure when it triggers.

Blocking copying and clicking is not effective.
Strip-Les-codeurs-et-les-images-english650-final.jpg
 

AliceShiki

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I just checked and, apparently, I can copy a chapter and paste it in a word document file. I just thought it would be nice to somehow disable copying posted content to dissuade pirates from copying a story and posting it somewhere else. Of course, someone might have the patience to copy a story word for word but it would be nice to not make it easy for them.

Or, am I being paranoid?
The only thing we can do about pirates, is to pretend they don't exist. No matter what you try, they'll always be able to find a way around it. And like... There are also some softwares that just look at the screen as if it was an image and convert it to text, which bypasses pretty much any protection you can put... >.>

It's basically a fight we can't win, so we should just accept that and work our hardest to make more people love our stories anyways~
 

0xReki

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Or post retaliate by riding the DMCA bus.
 

AliceShiki

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Or post retaliate by riding the DMCA bus.
There are dozens of pirates out there though? And like... They probably don't have their site hosted in the US, so they can ignore the US laws.

And even if you somehow managed to take your story down from one of them, they could just repost it or repost in a sister site.
 

Nab

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I just checked and, apparently, I can copy a chapter and paste it in a word document file. I just thought it would be nice to somehow disable copying posted content to dissuade pirates from copying a story and posting it somewhere else. Of course, someone might have the patience to copy a story word for word but it would be nice to not make it easy for them.

Or, am I being paranoid?
For me as a user it's annoying and English is not my first language if I don't the word and I wanna copy it and Google it but if it's disabled I leave that site because I hate what I don't understand
 

2501

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Webnovel doesn't allow right-click but you can enable Reader View in Firefox and copy from there.

I remember on one translation site they had funny messages hidden between paragraph that would get copied too by bots.
 

BenJepheneT

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just imagine some tenacious bastard literally pulling out two windows and copying the entire story word by word from site to document
 

HJ

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I was going to ask the same question. :blob_hmm: If scribble hub has the copy protect feature.

There is a hesitation on my part when it comes to releasing a novel in unprotected platforms. I get that anything posted on the internet is at risk of being plagiarised, but the copy protect feature is still a nice idea.
 

AliceShiki

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I was going to ask the same question. :blob_hmm: If scribble hub has the copy protect feature.

There is a hesitation on my part when it comes to releasing a novel in unprotected platforms. I get that anything posted on the internet is at risk of being plagiarised, but the copy protect feature is still a nice idea.
There is a 0% chance of anyone ever being able to make any sort of copy protection program that stops an OCR from grabbing your chapter.

Just accept that webnovels aren't protectable by nature.
 

HJ

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There is a 0% chance of anyone ever being able to make any sort of copy protection program that stops an OCR from grabbing your chapter.

That's sad. Wattpad prevents copying contents atleast on their app so I wondered if it could also be applicable here. If you do not mind explaining a bit more so I could understand. I have no idea how programming works.
 

AliceShiki

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That's sad. Wattpad prevents copying contents atleast on their app so I wondered if it could also be applicable here. If you do not mind explaining a bit more so I could understand. I have no idea how programming works.
Basically, there are multiple ways you can try copying a chapter.

The simplest method possible is to have a bot that copy pastes the content of the chapter from the webpage and posts somewhere... Those can in theory be stopped by stuff like copying protection.

However, it's ridiculously easy to bypass those copying protection thingies. Not to mention you can just press F12 and get the text directly from the page's code... So you need a more complicated protection method if you wanna stop bots.

But even if you do make a complex protection method that can actually stop things that try copy pasting what's written on your page... You can never stop a program that translates what is visible on the screen to text. Which is an OCR program.

Basically, an OCR program will look at the entire screen as if it was an image, and then it will identify the letters that are within said image and transform it back into text. It's basically impossible to stop a program like that as this would mean making the text illegible for your normal readers as well.

In summary, it's impossible to stop someone from copying your chapter if they want to use a good program to look at it. So the only thing you can do is to ignore the existence of thieves and focus on your own writing instead.
 
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