HP should install copy protection for its pages

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   janderson99posted 12 years ago

   One of the worst aspects of publishing articles on HP is that they can be so easily copied, published elsewhere and the copies can even outrank the original.
   While you can report the copying to Google this is a lost cause as the copying will continue over and over again. Most writers hope they can outrank the copies because of their greater authority.
   
   HP should look at various copy protection tools. I know that virtually all methods can be overcome including the one used by excerptz.com, transparent GIFs etc. What do you think?
   
   I came across a neat method recently which maybe worth considering:
   
   Copy the following text and paste it into a word processor or text tool:
   -----------------------------------
   Tһеrе іѕ nothing better tһаח a well trained dog tһаt stays аt уουr side wһеח guests ԁесіԁе tο visit- уου’ll bе proud οf һіm fοr listening tο уουr command, аחԁ уουr guests wіƖƖ appreciate tһе fact tһеу aren’t being knocked tο tһе ground bу аח overzealous greeting.
   -------------------------------------
   
   It becomes garbage.
   Anyone know how this is done? Would this method be worth considering? Are there other methods. I am looking for a method to apply to my own sites.

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      2besureposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      It doesn't matter.  It won't stop people who want to steal your content.  Do you remember the "don't walk on the grass" signs when we were little; or cross at the green and not in between?  People will do want they want to do!  It takes more energy to run them down then, to just keep writing.  If they can come up with something that works,I am all for it.

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      kschangposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      What you got there is not copy protection, but rather, charset incompatibility.
      
      HP uses UTF-8 (unicode) for content to allow wide variety of language content. However, when you copy and paste, you usually end up pasting in Western European, thus some of the characters are incompatible.  It's rather trivial to convert it back.

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         janderson99posted 12 years agoin reply to this

         FYI  - see below

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   psycheskinnerposted 12 years ago

   It copy-pasted fine for me.  That text has no code associated with it to prevent copying.

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      wildernessposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Interesting, and indicative of the problem.  I got garbage putting it into Open Office.  Full of odd characters.

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   Aficionadaposted 12 years ago

   For me, it turned several letters into different typefaces; some showed up as that rectangle that substitutes for an unavailable character or symbol, such as a Chinese character.  I would be curious to know how that is done.  I washed it through Notepad before pasting into Word.

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   AliciaCposted 12 years ago

   I pasted the paragraph into both a word processor and the TextEdit program on my Macintosh. Some of the letters appeared in a different typeface from the rest but the paragraph was still completely readable.

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      janderson99posted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Frustrating and intriguing isn't it. The text displays perfectly on the website but creates a problem when you copy and paste it. Sure you can get around it the hard way by replacing the corrupted letters, but it takes a lot of time and most copy cheats would probably not be bothered. Those that do, are probably not willing to risk their adsense accounts suspended. This is the essence of copy blocking - it won't work perfectly, but if you can make it tough to work around it - most cheats won't bother.
      
      How's it done? No come on guys - you can do better than that - do the obvious research. I'll let on a little later. Isn't this spilling the beans? I don't think so because even if you knew how it was done you would still need a program to fix it and there are ways of making the fixing very hard and complicated. What do you think?
      
      The real irony is that the copy cheats target the good articles - Why copy crap!
      
      I have my own articles site under development - I can copy an entire HP ariicle - text, images, captions, headings - everything just using the copy tool on the browser and paste it into that site -  Voila!  Its far tooooo easy!

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         janderson99posted 12 years agoin reply to this

         The answer is that the site replaced certain letters with their ASCII codes - BUT used odd variants rather than the standard ones.
         
         e.g. T&#1211&#1077r&#1077 &#1110&#1109 nothing better
         
         Word can interpret ASCII codes through its HTML tool but not the obscure ones used above - hence the weird display of certain letters. Other tools can't handle the codes at all. Text processors show all the ASCII as ????
         
         The cache version looks fine and Googlebot simulators shows the text OK.
         
         It would be possible to develop a program to do all the replacements in the copied and pasted text but this could be blocked by having several versions of the replacement program for the text html. on HP.
         
         I think this is worth looking at. Most of the copy cheats would not bother developing a program and would go elsewhere when they see that the copied stuff is corrupted.
         
         Have I let the cat (or dog!) out of the bag - not really as its a pain to fix the pasted text.
         
         Any comments or other suggestions???

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