Who’d have though that making an inaccessible site would be so hard!
Using Flash would be the first thing I would consider. Essentially all you need is a flash script that can read and output XML data - aka RSS feeds.
The idea being all HTML and content is served from one or more RSS feeds from your CMS - this would allow the client to add/edit content as normal.
Would not work, they could just get the javascript from their browser cache and then incorporate it into a Greasemonkey script.
Can you 100% guarnentee that you will never have a disabled person viewing your site, unless you meet them in person and get to know them, you can’t guarntee it. By disadvantaging disabled users your site could be illegal under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (IANAL - your lawyer/solicitor should be able to check your site and tell you whether or not it is legal).
You say that all your customers are easily able to contact each other, you’ll never stop them passing copies to each other whether you are giving them pre-printed or them viewing via a website. By making it very hard for them to access the data you could end up encouraging them to share copies with each other to avoid the hassle.
If JavaScript can decode it then all someone need do is to let the JavaScript decode run and then use their own JavaScript to copy the decoded version.
That page of mine that comes up in the results about encrypting pages with JavaScript is basically there so people don’t waste their money on “solutions” costing as much as several hundred dollards that can be beaten with one line of JavaScript.
See http://javascript.about.com/library/blsource.htm for a simple bookmarklet script that can capture the decoded HTML from any web page that doesn’t contain iframes or block popups. See http://javascript.about.com/library/blviewsource.htm for a user JavaScript that can always extract the decrypted source if the page can be displayed at all. Each of these scripts is way simpler than the ones that people use to try to protect their HTML. The ONLY way to display the page content in a way where people don’t have direct access to the source text is to use something other than HTML such as PDF or Flash which limits them to giving someone the entire file where at least there can be something in what they are passing on that indicateds that they don’t have the right to do that so that the recipient will be aware that they are receiving stolen goods.
Could be illegal? actually it is illegal, the difference is though that there are few cases of legal presidence which have gone to court and had action taken against individuals doing it, but it is becoming more common. Making any website inaccessible to disabled people (deliberately as this case would be) would violate disability law in dozens of countries (including europe). And no he cannot “gaurantee” that none of the people visiting his website will have a disability of some kind, not all disabilities are physically visible such as being wheelchair bound. Unless of course he knows none of them have visual impairments, learning difficulties, psychological or cognitive problems or even something like arthritis (which being physically imparing is counted as a disability). 
This site we’re working on is not a typical website. We literally know the names of all (well, most of them at least) of the users of the site, we have complete records of all of them so much of what is being discussed here is largely irrelevant. Our users are all required to have good vision and have good hand-eye coordination. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be interested in our content anyway.
I doubt any of our users would bother doing that, or even know how to do it. It is possible that one of them will know something about javascript and browsers, but it is unlikely. And it’s even less likely that they would go to the hassle. We know our users quite well, and they are unlikely to be highly skilled with computers.
I can 100% guarantee that no one using our site has a disability, or at least not one which would be affected by what we’re considering doing with our content. Previously I’ve met all of them, albeit with a web based system I won’t bother.
My business partner is a lawyer. He says there are no problems whatsoever. New Zealand has fairly lax laws on this type of thing anyway, not that it is an issue in this case.
Maybe. We’re willing to take that risk.
None of the people using our site will have disabilities that would be affected by us obfuscating our code. If they had any disability like that then they would have absolutely no use for our content whatsoever. It would be totally useless to them, so blocking them from reading it seems like a moot point. If they a visual disability, then they would not even be allowed to use the content, they would be in very serious trouble if they did as they need to sign a disclaimer (not with us, but another organisation) stating that they have no impairments which would prevent them from doing certain tasks (which includes looking at detailed stuff up close).
Thanks. Good points.
I’ve now stumbled across a potentially annoying problem, and that is that a large proportion of our users don’t have immediate access to Flash 
They do have access to it, but we would need to ask them to change to a different computer simply to use our service. They may even need to walk to a different building.
I’d like to make this as easy to use as possible for them to use, and forcing them to change computers could be quite annoying for them. Many of them tend to prefer to use specific computers and having to go use another one could really tick them off.
So I’m not sure the Flash idea will work unfortunately
At this stage, I think we’ve got it fairly well sorted. The Base64 encoding should be enough to confuse the heck out of them and then by loading it via Ajax from a dynamically changing URL and then combining it inside an iframe surrounded by some jumbled, meaningless code will hopefully be enough to stop them. And then by base64 encoding a simple transparent DIV on top of the content (inline styled) they’ll hopefully not figure out how to bypass the system. If they do bypass it … well, tough bickies for us I guess 
The more difficult you make it to copy, the more determined users will be to hack it, by-pass the protection measures you have and redistribute the content for free. Trust me, making things difficult for your users will minimise the chance you have of making any money out of the website - some people will do everything they can to scupper you, and others will simply refuse to use the site at all. Make the site worth using and people will be happy to use it.
At the end of the day, if someone is that determined to rip you off, they can re-type what’s on the screen into their text editor of choice, and save and distribute it at will. If people can see your website then they can pass it on. There is nothing you can do to stop them, short of causing their computers to explode and blow them into a million pieces 30 seconds after completing the page load…
How do you know that? What is this mystical resource that you are creating, that you can guarantee that nobody with any kind of disability would want to access?
They are legally required to have good vision. If they didn’t, then they wouldn’t be allowed to use the IP block required to access our site (we will probably be blocking everything but a small set of IP addresses).
And even if we don’t block other IP addresses, the content is only of use to those with good vision as they wouldn’t have a use for the content anyway since it used for a job which legally requires good vision.
I guess that leaves all us cross eyed individuals out in the dark then! 
Hey, that’s a valid reason… one of the companies my husband worked for built these applications, and the companies buying the applications were required to have Javascript, in the contract. If you’re selling something, esp for internal use or company-only use, you can demand pretty much anything in the contract.
I know someone who’s translating a desktop application for a large company into a web applictation, one which currently only works in Chrome (I’m working on making it work on a few more browsers : ) and well, he can demand that everyone in the company uses Chrome browser. It’s simply not something a general, public webpage can demand, most of the time (they seem to be able to demand Flash lawlz).
There are plenty of other types of disability that might affect the way a person can interact with their computer without them having poor vision…
Writing everything to a <canvas> tag might make it more difficult, though you’d need to constrain your browser support quite a bit.
Do you really need to publish this content in its entirety on your site?
If you expect people to pay for a copy, why not publish selected snippets? Whatever is enough to demonstrate its worth to them, but not so much that the more determined types will try to save it in one form or another and skip what’s left? Would that work for you? Obviously, I can’t second guess your market, but I think that it would be enough to prompt people to purchase.
Perhaps throw in some entities here and there, which are embedded via JS, and every say 3rd-6th (make it random) character is actually an image of the letter with no alt equivalent.
Throw some captcha lines all over it to make it more difficult for those auto-scan reader things.
Why not make the full content accessible only to registered users who paid to view it? You can do that by making them create an account for the website and pay for your services. Users who didn’t register can view only parts of the content.
Try Joomla or Drupal and make the pages viewable to whatever groups you like. Drupal has amzing security features…if you’re prepared to undergo the learning curve and terminologies etc.
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