A new tool to stop piracy. Interested in beta testing?
A few months ago I bought a small side project - a text protection tool - on IndieMaker (formerly 1k Projects).
Put simply, the tool prevents text and images from being copied. It turns anything you upload into a protected image viewable only through a lens. People cannot copy it, save it, download it, or remove the watermark.
It wasn't much to look at, but I saw potential in the idea. The developer and I teamed up, redesigned the front end, added some functionality, and are now ready for beta testing.
We know this prototype is pretty cool, and we have a few hunches on who might use this, but we aren't sure. So as part of our market validation, we'd love to talk to designers, copywriters, professors/TAs, and anyone else who thinks this could be useful.
Reply to this message or send me a private one if you are interested. Thanks for your time!
Cheers from down under,
screenshot + OCR?
Because you can only view through a lens, you'd have to take dozens of screenshots. And even then, the watermark would mess with the OCR (with some adjustments). Just added an image to the post to show you what I mean.
interesting :) does it stand users who know how to open the browser console?
Safe indeed. :)
It converts text to an image on the server side, and then jumbles it. The jumbled image is then sent back to the client.
So if you went into the browser console, all you will find is a jumbled image. :)
cool :) it might have its use-cases indeed, e.g. when you don't want the content to be machine-scrappable. I still wouldn't market it as totally protected though - as a human with a smartphone may simply record a video of the reading/viewing process. Yes, the text on this video will not be copypastable - but it will indeed be human-readable.
Yeah exactly - you'll never be able to protect something 100%. But you can make it extremely difficult to copy, replicate, or paste. It works with images too. Check it out and let me know what you think: http://copyprotect.io
took me about 10 minutes (from entering main.js) to show the full text... JS uglyfying would probably add another ~20 minutes to this.
the only way to get around it is to send server requests onmousemove, which can be super-costy server-load-wise and response-time-wise. But client-side JS is just not built for that :((
Yeah, unfortunately that would result in a pretty poor user experience. But fortunately I don't think we need "bank-level security" for this.
Still, your feedback is helpful. Can you try uploading an image and see if you can view the full image somehow?
The server returns 503 when attempting to upload a file... (jpg, chromium 83, ubuntu)
But anyway, I can display the whole canvas - no matter what's in it; I just hardcode custom magnifying glass dimensions into the function that shows an image. DM me if you need details, although I think that you get the concept :)
I'd think about usages in places where there's no money at stake and the users of this thing have fewer resources to hire someone from fiverr to do it for them - like at schools, for example :)
Good stuff. Appreciate the advice.