How do I design a site that will sell premium content online?. My client wants the text and images to be protected against theft and piracy.

He also wants the ability to control how long the content can be seen before before purchase.

He also wants to sell the content so only authorized users can print/save/distribute etc.

Any Ideas?

Al

Hi we'll have to spend a bit of time of this because there a quite a few choices you have to make, so its a matter of compromise at the end of the day.
Their is not a fat lot you can do about text protection apart from creating the text as images or encrypting it in some way.

There are loads of commercial products that encrypt the web page source, but I have seen a few free ones that do the job nicely. You'll just have to search However, the problem with encrypting is that your not going to see any search engines referring to words on your page as all they see is the original source text, which is garbled.

I haven't seen a PHP encrypter before, but I found an interesting product here: PHTML Encoder 3.4

Its worth checking out this just to give you a wide range of ideas on what you can do.

You should be able to do everything to the site without paying for anything so don't be coaxed into purchasing something unless you feel you really have to. As I write this, I found an interesting program called HTML guardian that also protects links and images. Their image protection works like this - [quote[the images included in some page are splitted into several pieces each, and those pieces have randomly generated names like qwerty.jpg. Then the html code is encrypted so that you can't see the url's of the pieces in the source. The encrypted page with splitted images look as the original one. This will surely stop direct linking because to display some image you have to link to let's say 10 different files - I don't think a normal person will do this. And you can't get the images from the browser's cache directly because there are only pieces of them there. You can still search for all the pieces and join them to have the original image, but this takes too much time and I don't think somebody will do it. [/quote] MOre on image protection here: http://www.wildlifephoto.net/article...rotection.html

Another simple way is to prevent hotlinking with mod_rewrite so that noone tries to use the images directly from the site. PNG image files allow you to place copyright information that can't be removed even when edited. Watermarking can be an effective deterrent too.

At the end of the day it is near impossible to protect your images so one of the best bets is to offer the lo-res versions for people to see and have the hi-res locked behind passwords and the like.

Rob

Thanks Rob


Isn't there a better route than wasting a lot of time encrypting/splitting/png-ing/randomly assigning file names etc..

Is there some type of solution that I can place on the server which wiill prevent the content stored on the server from being transfered to any workstation.

Like if I got an image stored on a server, why should i have to encrpt/split/mod_rewrite when I should use a program (if it exists) that will now allow it from being downloaded/cached/saved etc.

Isn't there a way to make the image disappear from the surfers workstation/pc after a set amount a time after the user enters the site?

At the end of the day it may be impossible to protect images, but IMHO offering the lo-res versions for people to see is a very lo-tech solution.

If we could invent the net and all the applications etc. that go along with it..we can probably invent a program that can protect the stuff we put on the net from being stolen.

Let me know if you or anyone following this thread knows of such a solution.

Al

This is very unlikely, though you can tell the browser through the headers not to cache the image. The problem comes by the fact that there are so many ways to retrieve the information such as print screen, image capture software, simple right click and save.

Have a look here: http://apache-server.com/tutorials/ATimage-theft.html and here http://www.e-powersellers.com/javaclick2.htm and there's an excellent reply here: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Web/Q_20691236.html

One thing I did think of though, which may not be a perfect solution though see what you think. If you try downloading a swf file at http://www.orisinal.com and play it on your computer, it won't work as it requires server side includes in order to work. This is an excellent way of preventing theft of flash files and why Ferry Halim's games aren't all over the internet. I'm not sure if it is using ASP or PHP to do it, but it would mean that they could only be viewed on your webpages. Its also possible to lock swf files, but as in everything there's normally a way to get round it though it is an excellent prevalent.

Rob