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Copy And Paste Means Copy What I Want And Paste What I Want

Heng-Cheong Leong, MyAppleMenu

I've been very annoyed with the practice of some web sites that changed the agreement between me and my computer on exactly what is been copied and pasted. As John Gruber describes it: "what happens is that when you select text from these web pages, the site uses JavaScript to report what you’ve copied to an analytics server and append an attribution URL to the text."

Like Mr Gruber, the nature of my hobby involves a lot of copying-and-pasting. This means that I have to also make use of my backspace key a lot when linking articles from websites that uses this stupid technique. In fact, I've removed many of these stupid web sites from my RSS reading list. (I still link to articles from these web sites, but only I've discovered them from other people, not from my own RSS reading. And I still hate to link to these web sites.)

Mr Gruber outlined two possible solutions to block the copy-and-paste technique used by these web sites. I'll try them today.