05Web & Browsers

What «allow copy» actually meant

This domain spent years as a one-button utility: paste a URL, get the page back with its selection blockers gone. The tool is retired. The mechanics are worth writing down, because the same blockers are still shipped every day — and they still fail.

Web & BrowsersReference

What a page does when it «blocks copying»

There is no copy protection in HTML. What exists is a short list of nuisances, and every one of them runs on the reader’s own machine, under the reader’s own control:

• user-select: none in CSS — the text is still there, the browser just declines to highlight it.
• oncontextmenu="return false" — the right-click menu never opens.
• onselectstart, oncopy and ondragstart handlers that cancel the event, sometimes replacing the clipboard contents with a promotional line.
• A transparent element stretched over the article so that clicks and drags never reach the text underneath.
• Keyboard traps that watch for Ctrl+C, Ctrl+U and F12.
• Rarely: the text is not text at all, but an image, or a font with a scrambled character map.

The first five are JavaScript and CSS. They are instructions to a browser that is under no obligation to obey them, and they are gone the moment scripting is off, the page is printed, or the document is read by anything other than a rendering engine.

Why the blocks do not hold

The page has already been delivered. By the time the handler fires, the words are in memory on the reader’s device. Everything after that is theatre. Reader modes strip the overlay. Print to PDF re-renders the text. view-source: and the network tab show the markup that was sent. Screen readers and translation tools read the DOM directly and never consult the oncopy handler at all.

Serving text as images is the only measure on that list that genuinely stops a casual copy — and it fails for everyone using a screen reader, breaks in-page search, defeats machine translation and stops the text from being indexed as text.

The cost nobody prices in

Selection is not only how people steal; it is how people read. Highlighting a phrase to look it up, dragging a quotation into a notes app, selecting a paragraph to have it translated or read aloud — these are the ordinary motions of using a document. A blanket user-select: none takes all of them away from every reader in order to inconvenience the handful who would have copied the article anyway, usually by script, and usually without ever loading the CSS.

The accessibility side is worse than an inconvenience. Assistive tooling relies on being able to address the text; overlays and cancelled events make a page harder to navigate for exactly the readers who have the fewest alternatives.

What to do instead, if you publish

• Decide what you actually fear. Scraping is done by scripts that do not run your JavaScript, so selection blockers do nothing about it; rate limits, tokens and server-side controls do.
• If the worry is attribution, say so in the page: a licence line and a canonical URL travel with the text when it is quoted.
• If the worry is republication, that is a copyright question, and copyright applies whether or not the text was easy to select.
• Keep the reading experience intact. A page that fights its reader loses the reader.

The tool itself

The utility that ran here fetched a page server-side and returned it without the blocking scripts and styles. It has been retired, and its cached pages have been removed from this site: they were copies of other people’s work, and keeping them was neither useful nor fair.

The interface was translated by its readers into more than two dozen languages. Those pages are still here, at their own addresses: