Disable select text

Why are sites doing this?

[Demaestro]

I just came across a site that disables the ability to select text within the webpage.

I am wondering is anyone else doing this?

Does anyone know why a site would do this?

[rocknbil]

In an effort to thwart copy and paste of their content, I would guess.

I've seen it in a few places. Oddly enough, although content theft is offensive enough, what really annoys me is people answering posts in forums, etc. by doing a direct copy and paste from a web page as if it was their contribution. Half the time they don't even read it. lol . . . .

Like any other Javascript defense mechanism, it's easily thwarted, but I guess most of those that would steal for *any* reason aren't smart enough to figure it out, so I guess there's some good to it.

[Demaestro]

Yes easily thwarted.

What gets me about it is that they will annoy more users than they will stop copying of their text.

I wonder how long until Opera and Firefox add it to their list of scripts to ignore. They have it for disabling right click and a couple other things too.

I also wonder if IE8 will bust this logic so it's users can take advantage of "Accelerators"

Obviously IE8 Accelerators won't work unless you can highlight a piece of text.