There’s a lot of terrible JavaScript out there on the webernets, particularly related to text selection. As I often include quotes in Link posts on this very site, I sometimes find myself briefly stymied by web pages which uselessly attempt to prevent copying text. This is most common on news sites, some of which break text selection entirely, while others modify copied text by truncating it or replacing it completely. It’s all pretty foolish, as it can be easily worked around in myriad ways, but that hasn’t eliminated the practice.
Recently, however, I saw some beautifully humane JavaScript that’s worthy of note. While writing this piece on AI insurance, I highlighted and copied some text over at the Financial Times. When I pasted it, I found more than I bargained for. The exact paste was as follows:
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
https://www.ft.com/content/1d35759f-f2a9-46c4-904b-4a78ccc027df
Insurers at Lloyd’s of London have launched a product to cover companies for losses caused by malfunctioning artificial intelligence tools, as the sector aims to profit from concerns about the risk of costly hallucinations and errors by chatbots.
As you can see, the FT is informing readers that wholesale copying and sharing of articles is not permitted. They also recommend using the sharing tools available to subscribers. Fair enough. Critically, however, they then still provide the copied text. That meant I simply needed to delete those first two paragraphs (which didn’t apply), and I was set.
After I spotted this, I spent a few minutes experimenting with the system. I quickly determined that copying a single word did not trigger the warning, nor did short sentences. Initially, I guessed the limitation was character-based, but that proved not to be the case. I ultimately figured out that copying 30 or fewer words results in only the desired text. With a selection and copy of 31 words, however, the warning is prepended to the text.1
I would have loved to have been part of designing this, but I was not invited to that particular meeting. Still, the process surely something like this:
“We don’t want readers copying entire articles. Should we stop them from copying text?”
“That’s a waste. They can get the text 17 other ways, so let’s not bother blocking it. But we can add a warning”
“OK, so any copy gets a warning added to it?”
“No, let them freely copy a word. Maybe they want to look it up in the dictionary.”
“We ought to give them a little more. Copying a sentence is OK too.”
And so on. I don’t know how they settled on thirty words, but it feels about right. However it all went down, the end result is eminently reasonable for all parties. Kudos to the web team at the FT.
Footnotes:
It actually seems to be 30 words plus a space, but close enough. ↩︎
