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Only Stupid People Think You Can Protect Your Content By Disabling the Right Mouse Click

Harvard Business Review

My original comments: You have to be pretty stupid and/or arrogant to think you can protect your content by such a simple ploy. You have to give them credit for also disabling the copy and paste keys, but there are lots of problems with what they're doing.

1. There are browser plug-ins that disable Javascript. Once you disable Javascript, you can grab all the text and the pictures.
2. The Opera browser completely bypasses Harvard's techniques.
3. With Mozilla, you can copy the text, but the right click is disabled. See step 1 for a solution.

Reader comments: None

My revised comments: Of course, this is an easy design item to fix and I recently received the following e-mail:

I’m the new editor of Harvard Business Review online, and I wanted to let you know I just instated a change to our Website that should—hopefully—alter your view of HBR.org.

We were (rightfully) featured as a “Web page that sucks” in 2005 because we had disallowed, at the browser level, the ability for visitors to highlight, copy, and paste text. I’ve finally changed the code so that now highlighting is allowed throughout the site. To assuage some concerns, I also created a new online Terms of Service that spells out our dedication to the dissemination of ideas as well as our commitment to protect our IP rights. The new Terms of Service can be found here.

I don’t know if you update your reviews to alert readers when changes have been made for the better, but if you do, please consider our site for re-review. We still have a ways to go towards improving usability and user-experience, but we just took a step in the right direction, and your site was a part of the decision to do so.

Yes, I update reviews, so consider this one updated.

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