Disable copy with javascript

Thanks to about.com for this great article.
Original article link – http://javascript.about.com/library/blnoright.htm

Web novices often believe that by blocking their visitors use of the right mouse button that they can prevent the theft of their web page content. Nothing could be further from the truth as there are so many ways to bypass the “no right click script” that the only effects that such a script has is to annoy those of your visitors who legitimately use the context menu (as that menu is properly called) in their web navigation.

Well here’s a really simple script that you can use to block all access to the context menu (not just from the right mouse button but from the keyboard as well) and really annoy your visitors. The script is even simpler than most of the ones that only block the mouse button and works in about as many browsers as those scripts do. Here’s the entire script for you.

Adding just that small piece of code to the body tag of your web page is more effective at blocking your visitor’s access to the context menu than the many no right click scripts that you can find elsewhere on the web because it blocks access from both the mouse button and the keyboard options described above.

Of course the script doesn’t work in all web browsers (eg Opera ignores it – but then Opera ignores all of the no right click scripts as well). It also does nothing to prevent your visitors from accessing the page source using the View Source option from their browser menu, from saving the web page and viewing the source of the saved copy in their favourite editor, or from using a View Source Bookmarklet.

Also, when the context menu has been disabled like this it can be easily re-enabled by typing javascript:void oncontextmenu(null) into the address bar of the browser.

Additionally, all of the scripts that I have seen to do this only block access to the context menu from the right muse button. They don’t consider the fact that the menu is also accessible from the keyboard. All anyone needs to do to access the menu using a 104 key keyboard is to select the object on the screen that they want to access the context menu for (for example by left clicking on it) and then press the context menu key on their keyboard (it’s the one immediately to the left of the right CTRL key) or on a 101 key keyboard hold down the shift key and press F10 to achieve the same effect.