Highlight and Ctrl+C protection

[Drew_the_Ghost]

Been seeing Copycats, taking other authors work and posting them under their name in Webnovel. Even going so far as to plug in their Patreon.
Is there a way to protect the actual content in the novel from being copypasted so blatantly?
Like having the actual story content highlight protected, but if the author needs for readers to copy something, they use the Author Notes feature.
An author I follow had to delete his story from here cause of this, don't want it to keep happening, I like this site.

 

[mitkopom]

I have noticed that here are much less scraper bot comparing to RR. Once i got a new chap released there it is immediately scrapped by a bot.

 

[Mortrexo]

Write a disclaimer in the chapter that says what sites the story is uploaded to. The bots will copy it. Warn readers that the story is constantly being edited, and if they don't want to miss those edits, they'll need to go to a real website.

If the Patreon link works, it doesn't matter where the reader found it though. That's just more income.

Follow this. So what if they copy your work on other pages? You can, every ten or so chapters, place a Patreon link or heads-up and remind them where to find the original content.

They are helping you gain more readers by copy-pasting and reposting. You have to be clever and use those pages to your advantage. Of course, don't be obnoxious about it like some places do. I mean placing "Original in blahblah" every some paragraphs.

The trouble begins if the reposting person is a human and takes the time to edit out those things. If they do, then... Well, you'll have to contact the support team of the page where they are posting and present enough evidence that it is your work. The date for the first chapters can be a definite prove.

I have yet to find trouble like this, so I don't really know.

 

[AliceShiki]

Follow this. So what if they copy your work on other pages? You can, every ten or so chapters, place a Patreon link or heads-up and remind them where to find the original content.

They are helping you gain more readers by copy-pasting and reposting. You have to be clever and use those pages to your advantage. Of course, don't be obnoxious about it like some places do. I mean placing "Original in blahblah" every some paragraphs.

The trouble begins if the reposting person is a human and takes the time to edit out those things. If they do, then... Well, you'll have to contact the support team of the page where they are posting and present enough evidence that it is your work. The date for the first chapters can be a definite prove.

I have yet to find trouble like this, so I don't really know.

Bots are often coded to auto-remove links, so this doesn't make much of a difference.

Generally speaking, you can't do much about pirates. You just have to accept they exist and that there are good chances of your story being stolen if you put it up online.

 

[bulmabriefs144]

Been seeing Copycats, taking other authors work and posting them under their name in Webnovel. Even going so far as to plug in their Patreon.
Is there a way to protect the actual content in the novel from being copypasted so blatantly?
Like having the actual story content highlight protected, but if the author needs for readers to copy something, they use the Author Notes feature.
An author I follow had to delete his story from here cause of this, don't want it to keep happening, I like this site.

Just to be clear, it should be possible to copypaste (say from a ODT or DOC) on the edit page? But not from the published page.

I think the easiest solution would be to make it unable to be highlighted. If you can't grab anything, and you can't Select All, then I can't see how you could copy anything.

Follow this. So what if they copy your work on other pages? You can, every ten or so chapters, place a Patreon link or heads-up and remind them where to find the original content.

Not a good solution. I sometimes check Korean manwha online. I'd be more than happy to support the original translators (or the author, if they supported it). But I am already here. Going to another site, which in turn tells me that the author doesn't know about this, yeah I don't think that many people bother. Prevent it from being copied in the first place.

 

[lnv]

I think the easiest solution would be to make it unable to be highlighted. If you can't grab anything, and you can't Select All, then I can't see how you could copy anything.

There is no such thing as being unable to highlight. You can make it unable to highlight for average users annoying them. Readers for example may wish to copy and paste lines into comments. But for anyone with even an ounce of basic knowledge, you can just use adblocker to overwrite css or just open developer tools webconsole on the browser and remove it. A bot can also scrape it.

To make it non-highlightable completely, you'd have to turn it into an image. And even then as mentioned OCR can get it.

It is just causing more problems than solving

 

[bulmabriefs144]

Turning it into an image (or a page image) might actually be ideal.

Yes, someone with real determination might still hack it. But here's the important part. If you can manage to get 80% of people to stop, this is a good thing.

More importantly, a visually accurate picture creates an unintended good side-effect of having a correct display. For example, in Oracle of Tao, my published version on Amazon was made using PDF conversion, and had alot of foreign language text (Chinese and Hindu Sanskrit mostly), along with pictures and the occasional zalgo text. I also had small caps, outlined and shadowed stuff. Pretty well all lost when I try it here. Often it would convert it to question marks or boxes, because the conversion wasn't very good.

Examples:

Most of this fancy text had to be sacrificed because the website just used basic text stuff instead of screenshots or something.

If conversion turned it into display, not only would copy-pasting go down drastically, but page quality would be precisely as the author intended.

I dunno the logistics at your end, but it doesn't seem like OCR is as big a threat as a novice just hitting Ctrl+C to entire pages.

Well anyway. I don't expect this, but if you do go through with it, drop me a PM. I would more than like to update Oracle of Tao chapters to display better.

 

[AliceShiki]

Turning it into an image (or a page image) might actually be ideal.

Yes, someone with real determination might still hack it. But here's the important part. If you can manage to get 80% of people to stop, this is a good thing.

More importantly, a visually accurate picture creates an unintended good side-effect of having a correct display. For example, in Oracle of Tao, my published version on Amazon was made using PDF conversion, and had alot of foreign language text (Chinese and Hindu Sanskrit mostly), along with pictures and the occasional zalgo text. I also had small caps, outlined and shadowed stuff. Pretty well all lost when I try it here. Often it would convert it to question marks or boxes, because the conversion wasn't very good.

Examples:

Most of this fancy text had to be sacrificed because the website just used basic text stuff instead of screenshots or something.

If conversion turned it into display, not only would copy-pasting go down drastically, but page quality would be precisely as the author intended.

I dunno the logistics at your end, but it doesn't seem like OCR is as big a threat as a novice just hitting Ctrl+C to entire pages.

Well anyway. I don't expect this, but if you do go through with it, drop me a PM. I would more than like to update Oracle of Tao chapters to display better.

That's a great way of making all your users that use text to speech devices start reading your story in a pirate site that copied your story via OCR.

 

[Zirrboy]

Turning it into an image (or a page image) might actually be ideal.

Yes, someone with real determination might still hack it. But here's the important part. If you can manage to get 80% of people to stop, this is a good thing.

More importantly, a visually accurate picture creates an unintended good side-effect of having a correct display. For example, in Oracle of Tao, my published version on Amazon was made using PDF conversion, and had alot of foreign language text (Chinese and Hindu Sanskrit mostly), along with pictures and the occasional zalgo text. I also had small caps, outlined and shadowed stuff. Pretty well all lost. Often it would convert it to question marks or boxes, because the conversion wasn't very good.

Examples:

Most of this fancy text had to be sacrificed because the website just used basic text stuff instead of screenshots or something.

If conversion turned it into display, not only would copy-pasting go down drastically, but page quality would be precisely as the author intended.

I dunno the logistics at your end, but it doesn't seem like OCR is as big a threat as a novice just hitting Ctrl+C to entire pages.

The issue with images isn't the copy vulnerability.

Screen readers cease to work, as do most possibilities to override the site theme/font on the client, which will be a minor inconvenience for most, but certain impairments can make reading a nightmare without.
Many browsers employ adaptive scaling on fonts to increase readability at different screen dimensions, which won't be applied to images, even if they're vector graphics of the text.

The second issue is delivery. The server would have to render the respective chapter every time it is requested, or expend memory to keep it cached. And then transmit it, at the expense of both server and client connection.

 

[greyblob]

Turning it into an image (or a page image) might actually be ideal.

Yes, someone with real determination might still hack it. But here's the important part. If you can manage to get 80% of people to stop, this is a good thing.

More importantly, a visually accurate picture creates an unintended good side-effect of having a correct display. For example, in Oracle of Tao, my published version on Amazon was made using PDF conversion, and had alot of foreign language text (Chinese and Hindu Sanskrit mostly), along with pictures and the occasional zalgo text. I also had small caps, outlined and shadowed stuff. Pretty well all lost when I try it here. Often it would convert it to question marks or boxes, because the conversion wasn't very good.

Examples:

Most of this fancy text had to be sacrificed because the website just used basic text stuff instead of screenshots or something.

If conversion turned it into display, not only would copy-pasting go down drastically, but page quality would be precisely as the author intended.

I dunno the logistics at your end, but it doesn't seem like OCR is as big a threat as a novice just hitting Ctrl+C to entire pages.

Well anyway. I don't expect this, but if you do go through with it, drop me a PM. I would more than like to update Oracle of Tao chapters to display better.

are you paying for the server costs from your pockets? storing and serving images is exponentially more expensive than a bunch of text.
also killing quoting which is a major reason why readers comment