Webmasters everywhere around the world are starving for content on their websites. Every second of the day some website somewhere on the Internet is the victim of digital content thievery. This content could be the content from a review, a news story, an article, or even sales copy that a website proprietor broke one's back over for weeks or even paid for. Let us not forget the graphics on the internet site either. Artwork theft is the most common digital theft of all.



The distressing thing is that it is so easy for the digital thieves to acquire the digital content. All they have to do is highlight, right click, select copy, and there you go the content from your website is now in their possession to do what they want with it.Admittedly article directories such as this one have helped, but did you know these digital thieves even steal content from the article directories too? They sure do. Now there are even a couple of programs that will download an entire whole website and with just a few clicks change the downloaded content to appear to be original content on another website. So what can we do about it?

There are many scripts a webmaster can use that will block the use of right clicking on a webpage. Most all of these are JavaScript or cgi scripts that do incapacitate the right click action. Some will even display a predefined popup saying that right clicking has been disabled.

Well that's great but what about the unscrupulous webmaster that just goes to his View source menu option inside his browser? There really is no simple answer to that problem. Some webmasters have even went so far as to use escape encoding after they have coded their html before uploading it to their website. This is not failsafe as there are utilities that will also decode and unescape the distorted code that they see in view source. Still it at any rate it thwarts most of the copy and paste digital thieves.

Developers in web 2.0 technologies proclaim to making advancements in stopping digital theft, but the techniques are still way early in development and not stable enough for the plethora of web browsers in use today.

So for now the best we as webmasters can do is to use one of available JavaScript and even go so far as to escape encode for added protection. Hopefully in the near future this problem will be history as the web developers of today put their heads together and diligently work to solve the trouble that allowing right clicks causes.