Best way to prevent a written document from being copied?

I'm writing some articles for somebody and we've agreed they can pay me once they have been delivered and they're happy.

They could easily take the articles and decide not to pay me, so I'm wanting to send without the possibility of them selecting all > copy > paste into something such as their website.

My current thinking is to send it as a screenshot, so they can read it, but the only way they can really use it is if they type it all out themselves. Best option?

Even if you send it as a screenshot image, there are OCR readers that can read the texts off of an image and spit it all back out as a text file.

There's no way you can prevent copying and paste on a webpage either as that can easily be disabled by turning off Javascript.

wchu88 said:

Even if you send it as a screenshot image, there are OCR readers that can read the texts off of an image and spit it all back out as a text file.

There's no way you can prevent copying and paste on a webpage either as that can easily be disabled by turning off Javascript.

Click to expand...

I guess the majority of people won't be aware of OCR readers, so looks like sending it initially as an image is my only option.

ScreamingMidget said:

I guess the majority of people won't be aware of OCR readers, so looks like sending it initially as an image is my only option.

Click to expand...

Forget it. Someone who could come up with the idea of not paying for work done is for sure going to research how to "read an image".
See it as a social experiment.

ScreamingMidget said:

I'm writing some articles for somebody and we've agreed they can pay me once they have been delivered and they're happy.

They could easily take the articles and decide not to pay me, so I'm wanting to send without the possibility of them selecting all > copy > paste into something such as their website.

My current thinking is to send it as a screenshot, so they can read it, but the only way they can really use it is if they type it all out themselves. Best option?

Click to expand...

The only real solution to these kind of problems is not to send the product until you have got paid in full.

Because when it comes to text, if they can see it, they can copy it. If you got paid $100 for making the document, it will only take them $10-20 extra to pay someone on some microjobs website to run an OCR on your document and get the text.

Now you can send them a screenshot as "proof of work" and say "here's the screenshot as proof, now send me my money to get the whole document". But it's not like that prevents them in someway from stealing your work.

And that's why you don't even need to send the screenshot of the whole document. Just open it in a word processor or a document viewer that shoes a part of the document and you can screenshot that as proof.

In the end, it comes down to to trust. Your client should trust you that you will deliver the product