I'm curious about ways to prevent or minimize copying of images on the internet. Other than prominently displaying a copyright notice, is there any way to prevent a download in the first place? Say what you will about AOL (I could say plenty!), they have figured out a way to do just that. When I hold my Mac mouse button down over an image, the usual box with downloading options doesn't appear. I haven't tried it with a Windows mouse right-click. I'm being published on the net and I'm building my own web site and it would be great to plug that hole!

-- michael locke (wiplocke@aol.com), September 14, 1999

Answers

If you can see an image on your computer screen it's on your system hard drive somewhere. Anyone with the will can figure out where it is. You can also capture any image on your screen. Screen captures from web browsers always reveal all the pixels in an image unless there's some HTML code that resized the image.

Your best bet... BIG watermark and relatively small images. That way they can look, save, and reproduce only low rez images.

If you want to discourage the curious you can write a simple java script that disables the "save as" feature but the image is all ready on the hard drive. Any image browsing software that is looking at your internet cache file will easily display the image and you can save it from there.

-- Rick Gerard (gerpro@gte.net), October 28, 1999.

you may want to check out http://webclipart.about.com/internet/webclipart/msub67c.htm for options on copyright protection.

-- Aaron Lee (kd7apq@juno.com), January 04, 2000.

Theres a real ez way.... there is an html code that u type b4 the pic and it prevnets copying amd displays a box with a message from you. You can also enter another code that will shake their screen is they try it more then once and that will crash their computer. So if you want the codes I will be willing to give them. Either email and if u get no reply post a message here and Ill email it to you.

-- BIG SAL (salrulz@aol.com), October 25, 2000.