How to stop users from copying or printing text from my web page?

Question

I have a web page (on .Net platform, with C#) with text content and I would like to block users from copying the text or printing the document.
If the user is hard out on attaining a copy of the page, I know he can. But I would like to make it as hard as possible.
I have found a few points on it.

• Using Java Script to block user from copying text. Downside is user can easily copy text from source.
• Do not make the text into 1 big image, as user can print it out in one go.
• Use a plugin to show text as scrollable in a defined viewport size without the ability to copy text. Then the user has to take pain to print every bit he can fit in the window viewport, which is fine for me. Use Flash in this case.
• I have seen ionCube's (php) solution where you cant copy or view source text, but the downside is it can be printed easily. I would like to see a asp's encoding solution here along with ability to block user from printing the page :)
• Scribd is not a solution because if you chose to stop users from copying text from your scribd document, it converts the text to a tough to read image.

There could be more solutions out there I am unaware of.
Can you please let me know the best solution in this case?

Answer 1

There is no solution. Any webpage has to be represented as a DOM in memory and there are no shortage of tools to let people manipulate that and extract text from it.

DRM is ineffective at best, and when HTML is involved "the best" is a long, long way away.

Answer 2

You can use the initial solutions and use a CSS rule for hiding all in the print version:

<style type="text/css" media="print">* { display: none;}</style>

Of couse, as Quentin said, theres no definitive way of doing this, but blocking the selection, using an encoded version of the text that gets writen in the page by javascript and using this CSS snippet you can get about 80% of the users.

document.getElementById('elementId').innerHTML = unescape(escapedTextGoesHere);