Experiment in
Picture "Protection"

   See that picture above? It's been protected against the "right click" by a method some people recommend. To make the demonstration more dramatic, we have NOT suppressed the "right click" on this page. (We could have done that, but it would make little difference in terms of the amount of protection offered for the picture.)

   To see what we've done, start by right-clicking on the image, then choose Save Picture As, and click there. The picture's file name will show up as magic.gif. You could save that, but all you'd get is the transparent gif named magic, not the picture you saw. The "secret" in this process is that the picture you see above is the background of a table cell with invisible borders, and the cell content is the transparent gif named magic, which has been made to be exactly the same size as the picture.

   Here's what the souce html code looks like:

<TABLE CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="0" BACKGROUND="ag04b.jpg">
<TR>
<TD align="center"><IMG SRC="magic.gif" WIDTH="500" HEIGHT="318" ALIGN="Top"></TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>

   The image you're after is that one named ag04b.jpg. That, by the way, is a picture of a building that belongs to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, located in Beltsville, Maryland. That image, as you can see, is the background for the table itself. Because magic.gif is transparent, the picture of the building shows through when you view the page.

   Now let's suppose you want to "steal" that picture of the building. (It's mine, and I will let you have it anyway.) You can't get it by just right clicking on the image, but it's still easy enough to get it. At the top of the browser window, find the word "file" and click on it. From the drop-down, choose "save" and click on that.

   Now pick some folder on your hard drive that's easy to remember, and click the save button. Your job is done. You will find in that folder on your hard drive two new items. One will be an html file named protection.htm. There will also be a folder named protection files. Inside that folder will be three image files. One will be the transparent gif named magic.gif. The second will be the background of this page, named oebg.gif, and the third one will be ag04b.jpg, the picture you were after. You have completely defeated our "protection" with just a few well-chosen mouse clicks. This process of stealing the picture would work just as easily if the page had "no right click" javascript on it, since that doesn't affect the file and save process.

   So what is our advice, after all this? Simple. If you have a picture that you don't want stolen by others, don't put it on any web page, with or without "protection".