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Source linking back from browser copy-paste

By Posted by Alan Wexelblat

I can't decide if this is cool, creepy, or both. Best if you do the experiment yourself to see what's on, so follow these steps:

1. Go to http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205737/Man-killed-shards-glass-hurling-girlfriend-shop-window.html.


2. In your browser (I've tried in Firefox and others report it works in IE, Chrome, and other desktop browsers) select a passage of text, say a paragraph, and "Copy" it.


3. Bring up a text editor such as Notepad on a PC or similar (even works in Emacs) and Paste using whatever operation that editor uses for pasting text.

Now if you're like me and my friends you see the text that you copied and also this:

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205737/Man-killed-shards-glass-hurling-girlfriend-shop-window.html#ixzz0NuRbqTSe

The amount of text copied that is necessary to trigger this seems to vary by which browser you start in.

Viewing the page source doesn't give any immediate clues as to what's going on, so I'm guessing it's some kind of javascript hook. On the one hand I think it's a fairly clever way to encourage people to link back to the original content and seems to be much more in keeping with what I think of as the "spirit" of the Web than wrapping up content in passwords or DRM. On the other hand, silently adding text into peoples' copy buffers strikes me as creepy and probably a good way to manufacture a code injection hack.

Full post as published by Copyfight - The Politics of IP on August 11, 2009 (boomark / email).