How to prevent redistribution of content bought online - piracy-prevention

Is there a way to prevent content (media) files from being used by anyone except those actually paying for the content? At this point I am thinking of e-books created with the use of FlippingBook software, or e-books in the form of PDF files, downloadable from a web site. What I want is that only the person purchasing the content file will be able to open/view it, but if he/she shares it with others, those will not be able to.
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. (If I am in the wrong forum, sorry, please redirect me to the correct place.)

I work for a copy protection company. I will try my best not being biased by my work.
Yes, protection is possible. Some will say that it's not worth it and you should focus on making your product better, rather than wasting money on copy protection. This is true in some cases, but not in all. A good copy protection will increase sales, as people can't share your product with each other. Some countries and products are more exposed than others, so make the choice you believe is best for the success of your products.
The keyword you should be searching for is "Copy protection". My advice for you would be search the web for "copy protection" vendors if you want a professional product. Make a list of those you trust the most and contact them.
If you choose a professional product, test the protection carefully, and in many ways. Badly made protection can cost you customers, due to unhappy customers and support issues. These cases of badly made protection is what have made many users hate DRM, copy protection and etc...
If you on the other hand don't want to pay for it, but are searching for freeware, then I can't give any good advice as I don't know any. If you want to make one your self then you should read this post: All About Copy Protection it might be old but still valid for copy protection today.

Related

Duplicate Wordpress Site

I am writing to see if anyone has any tips on how one might be able to duplicate a Wordpress site.
We have branded and designed a research study site, and would like to copy this site entirely and rebrand it for a different study.
Does anyone know what might need to go into this to do so? Having trouble figuring this out!
Best,
Taylor
I guess it depends on what you mean by "rebrand". To just duplicate the site should be a relatively easy job to do. You will have to download everything from you public_html and also get a backup of your database. Then upload the files from public_html to a new hosting and also import the database.
After that part now arise some more things. First of the domain name. You will need to change the domain name to reflect a new one you want to use -- i will not get into details about that since you can find lots of good tutorials on how to do that with simple googling. If you need to change any pictures/logos and anything else since you designed it you should know what to change.
Then if there are remaining parts that need to be changed, for example there are many cases in texts fields where the brand of the previous research site is mentioned then I can suggest using a tool like wp-cli which is the only tool currently that comes to my mind for such a cache. It is a really useful and powerful tool but it requires you to have access to ssh to the hosting.
If i come up with something else as well, I will update this.

Copy information from external website to my website

Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask and if it is, please do let me know where best to do so.
I want to write a script that will pull data from website B (external site, not owned by myself) and display that data on website A (site owned by myself).
Now, I know how to do this programmatically and so my question is more about the legalities of the approach.
For example, Twitter provides API access so that you can embed tweets or a twitter feed into your page. The sites that I would like to pull data from may or may not have such APIs and so I would have to write a scraper.
Am I allowed to scrape information from websites and display it on my own site? I will of course make it absolutely clear where the information has come from; I do not intend to use any information and claim that is is my own.
I think this is generally frowned upon, as you are basically doing the same as copying a CD putting your own label on it and selling it to others (i.e. taking someone else's stuff and pretending it's your own). I suppose it depends on the licence of the web site you are scraping. If the web site provides an API (like Twitter), then they probably allow copying.

How can I help my client select a Wordpress template for an intranet?

I have to put an extranet on the Wordpress CMS for a non-IT professional.
He told me he wants a community intranet for his clients.
I researched on the web and found three templates which can meet his needs: Thrive, Woffice and Alliance.
But I don't really know how I can choose between them. It seems they can make same things and I need help to take my decision.
How can I find the advantages and drawbacks of them?
Good work!
Ultimately, you cannot know for sure without embarking on the implementation, so it is a case of reducing the risk. If it becomes clear the selection you've made isn't working, you can switch to an alternative with relatively little disruption.
I suggest you take the role of advisor and work with your client to decide. Summarise your findings, prepare a presentation in which you demonstrate each template (even if just the demo mode on the theme site) and listen to their feedback.
If you are looking for people with direct experience of implementing Wordpress intranets who may have been through the same process, try some of the intranet groups on LinkedIn.

How to manage users on many sites under one Drupal Installation?

I work for a government organization and we are trying to move to Drupal. My job right now is to figure out the best way to limit access to content based on a user and their roles.
The big issue I have not yet figured out is this:
If we want to have many different sites for many different departments each with their own users. Can we limit access to content and taxonomy terms (and really anything at all that one department should or should not see) all on the same site? In my research it seems like this is possible but it involves the creation of many, many different content types and roles and basically making one massive Drupal site.
Is this the best way to go? Is it better to have one site with many nodes or many sites? If many sites is the way to go will they all still have the same domain? (ie: www.government.com/parks , www.government.com/police, etc...)
If anyone has some insight or resources about this issue I would be very appreciative. I am willing to buy books or other resources (within reason) if they are worthwhile resources.
You can go with having different subdomains for different departments. Domain Access module would be helpful in that case. In this case, the code base would be same for all subdomains (as there would be only one drupal installation) but the users are considered different. This is because each domain is given a unique domain id and that differentiates.
Video on Domain Access Module
Go through the project page of the module and you can get more details. Hope this helps you.

Architecture ideas to allow customers to build their own site, based off external site's data?

I'm not entirely sure how to properly ask this, so please bear with me.
I have an idea for a site I would like to build, which would basically be a site for members to create some data and have it housed in my database. I would like to offer a value-add to the site which would allow people to spin off their own website via my own "website builder" tool (probably some sort of CMS). Their website would be able to communicate with my master database to display their data.
Getting down to the crux of the topic, I'm looking for architectural advice/ideas/etc. regarding what services I could use to do this. I'm not looking a 100% automated solution, but something along these lines (which may not be completely correct, I admit):
Customer puts in an order to create their own site, using my tools.
I setup a separate domain for them, roll out the CMS foundation to the site, and the customer has full editing control of the CMS to design it however they would like.
The CMS would have some customizations so that it includes functionality to call APIs located on the master site, which would return the relevant data.
In the research I have done on SO, I've seen a lot of mentions of Umbraco which honestly looks like a good start. I'm just worried that when I go to upgrade a version, I have to deal with overwriting my custom API functionality. I'm guessing this is the nature of the beast, and requires me to accept/plan for it.
Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Some high-level starting points? Thanks!
I've been thinking about this same issue for my customers.
It is not hard to automatically roll out a stock cms such as Wordpress or Joomla. This sort of thing is done all the time by "1 click installers" that DreamHost and others have.
Including custom widgets or plugins for the CMS that can connect to your main app is also not hard.
For dns, you can use Amazon Route 53 or other DNS services that include a good api at the dns management level.
I suggest that you focus on using a CMS that is very popular (eg Wordpress or Joomla) rather than something less well known such as Umbraco. Using a more popular system will drastically reduce your training costs--remember that if you supply the CMS to your customers, then they'll also expect you to supply the support for it...

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