Comments on: DRM: Cutting Off Your Prose to Spite Your Face

By: Foo

Foo — Fri, 08 May 2009 23:45:29 +0000

Wow, surely there is an easier and simpler way to not have your info known. Don’t tell anyone about it in the first place. That way all of the above energy would not have been wasted for a “nothing” outcome :)

By: samanime

samanime — Thu, 07 May 2009 12:54:51 +0000

If you stopped for a moment and thought about it, you’d probably guess that someone who implemented something like what they use probably doesn’t realize the negative effects of their approach. If they don’t realize the negative effects, it’s doubtful they would do something special to correct it for other areas (or wouldn’t want to because they’d figure people would just still it from there).

This is definitely a ridiculous case and hopefully an exception to the rule. However, I fear this type of thing is all too common. Typically I would never refuse to do a website for a client. If I client approached me with this type of thing, it’d definitely be a coin toss as to whether I’d keep it (and if I did, I’d likely raise my rate if they insisted on this).

By: raena

raena — Tue, 05 May 2009 02:49:09 +0000

@Dan Grossman, if you look at the Google text cache of a MIS article, you'll see the text is not being presented in full. You're right, they could serve something else to a spider, but it doesn't seem that way from here.

By: Shadow Caster

Shadow Caster — Mon, 04 May 2009 04:51:00 +0000

I’m quite impressed by the method used. I wonder about the person who thinks of these things.

By: AlexW

AlexW — Mon, 04 May 2009 00:06:58 +0000

Nothing about this stops the site from offering an RSS feed; the text of their articles is no doubt stored in a database, and there’s no reason the RSS reader has to format its output the same as their CMS formats it for the website. They can put it in normal plaintext in the feed.

Dan, certainly there’s nothing technically stopping them having an RSS feed, any more than there’s anything stopping them putting machine readable text on the site. It’s their philosophical position on making their text available that would seem to prevent RSS.

By: lorenw

lorenw — Sun, 03 May 2009 15:37:56 +0000

Let me get this straight, I can write a cURL script to get the content onto my website by replacing the div tags and such(scraped), Since I have removed their stuff I have nice formatted unique content.

Defeats the pupose.

By: Dan Grossman

Dan Grossman — Sun, 03 May 2009 09:37:40 +0000

Several points of this article aren’t necessarily true.

Nothing about this stops the site from offering an RSS feed; the text of their articles is no doubt stored in a database, and there’s no reason the RSS reader has to format its output the same as their CMS formats it for the website. They can put it in normal plaintext in the feed.

Similarly, nothing says that they are producing the same output for the search spiders as they are for you. They can easily identify the search spiders by IP and user agent, and serve them the raw text instead of the DRM’d version.

By: ArtemD

ArtemD — Sat, 02 May 2009 11:52:13 +0000

Oh wow this is just beyond stupid. It makes my head hurt ><

By: Simon Grae

Simon Grae — Sat, 02 May 2009 03:27:57 +0000

The final insult here must be the ability to combine both easily… how can an enterprise so large, with such resources, with obvious management ability fail to view the gross oversight of their employees. DRM is a big issue; in particular with content, and their lack of egress in these issues smacks of excess and laziness

By: Xylex

Xylex — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:04:46 +0000

So you stop casual cutting and pasting, but then your site looks horrible with a monospaced font and search engines can’t find anything?
Stuff like this reminds me of my retail loss prevention days. If we lock it up really securely, the theft rate goes down, but then sales also stop.