asp.net content obfuscation

Question

I'm looking for a strategy that would allow me to obfuscate HTML content delivered on a web page in order to prevent the reader from selecting and copying the text into the clipboard and using it either via the browser output or via inspection of the underlying HTML source. The solution has to browser and platform independent. Source language is C# ASP.NET.

One such strategy would be to pre-render the page into an image and transmit the image and this is what they use to look at the page. In theory this sounds kinda cool, but the reality is, pushing images around can be costly in terms of transmission.

Another idea I thought of is to create a font where the characters are mixed up. "ABdcBA" in the font is really read as "render". So if they copied the text or even looked at the HTML they'd see and copy ABdcBA, but would read "render".

Looking at a page like: http://colddata.com/developers/online_tools/obfuscator.shtml#obfuscator_view gives me the ability to put jibberish into a variable and do a simple transform, but the output is still copyable.

A page like obfuscation tool for asp.net for html implies that I could make it hard to read, but I am still looking for some way to make the content very hard to use, short of taking a screen shot and using OCR to transform the text.

It's not that the text I'm trying protect is copy-protected, but I'm trying to prevent poaching of the content by a third party.

Any other ideas?

Answer 1

You could try delivering scrambled HTML content and using javascript to unscramble the contents on page load. Savvy users will still be able to use Firebug to get the data straight from the DOM, though.

Copy-paste will also still work, but you can use CSS to prevent selection. Disable Copying in a Div

As noted by others, if users want to get hold of your content, there will always be a way.