Image Theft: Disabling The Right-Click Option

Many people ask my thoughts on how to prevent others from copying images off a website. Anyone who puts graphics up on a site knows it’s all too easy to right click on an image and save it to your desktop. You’ve done it, I’ve done it, everyone does it. You can disable right-click options on your blog, though, which helps protect from theft.

I was surprised to find that the majority of bloggers say don’t disable right-click options. Well, that was a shocker. Here are the top two reasons:

1. People are annoyed when they can’t right-click. Many people use the right-click options to navigate instead using the back button or keystrokes. When you disable right clicking, the code or plug in on your blog disables all right-click capability. Many of the new versions of IE or Firefox also use right click for other functions besides navigation.
2. Disabling Leads to a False Sense of Security. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There will always be someone finding a way around the security options. You may have stopped the person from stealing the image for the moment, but the savvy surfer knows a screen shot often works just as well.

To see exactly how much it would annoy me to have right-click options disabled, I found a plug-in to disable the right click on this blog. It took less than five minutes before I deactivated the plug-in.

Sure, it was great to keep people from copying the images, but I had forgotten about the right-click spell-check options. When it’s late at night and I’m bleary from working all day, I need help to catch misspelled words.

It all comes down to whether you want to please yourself or please your blog visitors and readers. I’m still looking into other ways to protect images on websites, though. I did get this response from Brett Trout, author of Cyber Law, after I read his post regarding photography and privacy laws:

“If people are stealing your blog photos, I would suggest posting a way for people to license your photos for a fee. You can make the fee whatever you like.

I would also file a copyright registration on the most likely to be infringed pieces and have a cease and desist letter prepared to send to infringers. I would demand the license amount from the infringers in the letter and sue them if they refuse to pay.

The copyright laws provide for payment of attorney fees if you register the copyright soon enough. Here is another blog post I wrote about using other people’s photos in your blog.”

These posts deal mainly with the use of images without the subject’s approval, which is a whole other kettle of fish. This has given me more food for thought and I’ll be writing about it in the near future.

PS: After Brett read my comments he was kind enough to post some “Free Advice” on the topic of swiping images. Thanks again, Brett, for taking the time to post that!