Internet is full of images and pictures flowing all around the web, yet with such variety there are no proper tools available to protect individual content from being copied. Although most of the countries have some laws regulating copyright issues such as International Copyright Basics or TRIPS Agreement, Berne Convention, International Governing Copyright Agreement; usually users rather ignore these laws.
The exclusive rights are, however, not absolutely protected and do not give the creator total control of their works and, obviously massive resonance and growth of social media doesn’t help in this case. Photos are being copied and shared in seconds after their release. Due to these facts I have decided to write down couple of thoughts about simple, yet effective way of protecting WordPress exclusive content from being copied or stolen.
There are couple of WP plugins built on JavaScript techniques to protect the source code of the page and disable image saving via right-click. I will mention two of them, just because they are still being supported and updated from time to time, other similar plugins haven’t been updated for the last couple of years now.
No Right Click Images Plugin
The good thing about ‘No Right Click’ is that the product disables image download, still allowing users to apply other options of the right click.
The plugin is absolutely free. It also includes ‘Prevent Drag and Drop’ option. Authors also added a nice feature to the settings, giving logged users ability to save images, yet keeping the surfers blocked from saving ability.
Good to know that Images uploaded via the WordPress Media uploader will open in a window if clicked. They are not protected, so this plugin allows to indicate that there should be no action if the image is clicked.
WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click
This plugin has more options including functions to disable CTRL+C, CTRL+A, CTRL+V and other button combinations, allowing to protect not only screenshot captions but also texts from being copied. The same options are equal for Mac users.
The Pro version which costs 29$, includes pop-up alert messages when user hit the right click button. Also Home page or single posts protection can be selected separately.
Of course there are some techniques with server-side scripting you can use instead of these plugins to hide direct source or URL to the image. Browsers can only see what you want them to see.
Among these tricks is a transparent GIF or PNG, placed over images. Use CSS to make the transparent image appear on a layer above the original image. The end result would be that when someone tries to right-click the image for saving it, he’ll actually save the transparent image instead of original content.
Also have in mind the fact that WordPress gives some tips on preventing content from being theft, stating to include bold copyright notice on blogs and websites. This may help those who don’t want to block the right-click anyhow. Of course don’t forget about the effective copyright protection method, which is watermark. major photo-stock companies still stick to this method.
Image protection on the internet can be quite tough, but at the end of the day, there is no 100% protection for images being copied or stolen, yet the steps described above would help to protect the exclusive content in the best way possible.
