Are Popular Web Browsers Good For Copy Protection?
The short answer is NO. Popular web browsers are absolutely useless for copy protection.
But there are copy protection services available for use with popular web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari. These services are popular with many web designers and site owners but only because they are naive. Perhaps they want to believe that such solutions do work because they are afraid of not allowing normal browsers through fear of being unpopular.
For example, a comment made by one medical course administrator was that they would never use the ArtisBrowser web browser because it is not popular. Well ArtisBrowser will never be “popular” because it hasn’t been designed to download and copy everything on the Internet. In fact ArtisBrowser was designed to do just the opposite... protect web content from copy, theft and plagiarism.
With popular web browsers, the reality is that while copy protection using solutions like Widevine to protect video may seem to work for the average user, that protection is superficial. Such an observation can be likened to looking at the tip of an iceberg in that while it may be safe from the first methods of copy that come to mind, it will not be safe from the many other methods of copy that are known to more experienced web users.
Popular web browsers are and will always be designed at cross purposes to copy protection because their aim is to be popular. Not only do they provide every opportunity to save, download and capture anything stored on the web, but they also provide the means to evade safeguards that may be in the way.
Let’s look at some of the many ways to copy web content:
- Save file to disk.
- Save page including all elements.
- View page source for file locations.
- Select, copy and paste by right-click mouse action.
- Screenshot by PrintScreen, Ctrl-C and other hotkeys.
- Screenshot by 100s of screen capture softwares.
- Screen recording by 100s of video capture softwares.
- Print page.
- Use printer driver for conversion to another file format or plain text.
- Password share of content protected by login.
"Remote view" involves viewing a computer’s desktop from another computer. For some examples, on Windows there is a service for Remote Desktop Connection that will enable a user to login to another computer. VMware is one software that can be used to create virtual partitions to run any type of operating system (OS) that runs independent of the host machine, and from one of those partitions the user can login to the main desktop. Zoom and Teams are examples of the many web conferencing solutions that enable users to share their desktop.
Can the popular web browsers prevent users from using these applications? The answer is NO.
In fact popular web browsers now make it easier to view remote desktops by incorporating web conferencing solutions like Google Meet. Virtual software is no longer needed and popular web browsers are still be touted as being safe to use with copy protected content?
So the only secure solution can be one that keeps popular web browsers away from copy protected web content, and that is why the ArtistScope Site Protection System (ASPS) and ArtisBrowser are the only copy protection solution that can be trusted. ASPS delivers encrypted content and only ArtisBrowser can decrypt and display that web content, while protecting it from all methods of copy and capture.
ASPS now provides the option of closing popular web browsers that fools have assumed can be anything more than an obstruction to copy protection.
Author: William Kent
Date: 26th February 2023
Return to DRM and Copy Protection
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