Escape Characters for Songs?

[Nehmo]

I discovered some lyrics sites http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/o/one_republic/secrets.html
put the actual lyrics of a song in the source HTML document in escape
characters. What’s the purpose of this?

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

I discovered some lyrics sites http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/o/one_republic/secrets.html
put the actual lyrics of a song in the source HTML document in escape
characters. What’s the purpose of this?

In a vain attempt to prevent copying the lyrics...

"I need another story
Something to get off my chest
My life gets kinda boring
Need something that I can confess

'Til all my sleeves are stained red
From all the truth that I've said
Come by it honestly I swear
Thought you saw me wink, no
I've been on the brink, so..."

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

I discovered some lyrics sites http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/o/one_republic/secrets.html
put the actual lyrics of a song in the source HTML document in escape
characters. What’s the purpose of this?

Hard to tell. Probably there is no purpose. Probably the text has just
been processed by a program that converts everything to character
references. It could be a precautions against incidential non-ISO-8859-1
characters in data - a precaution taken too far, and too sloppily (the
references do not end with a semicolon, which implies that the data
won't work as such in XML context).

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

Hard to tell. Probably there is no purpose. Probably the text has just
been processed by a program that converts everything to character
references. It could be a precautions against incidential non-ISO-8859-1
characters in data - a precaution taken too far, and too sloppily (the
references do not end with a semicolon, which implies that the data
won't work as such in XML context).

I think I am on the correct track. There is JavaScript disabling the
right-click so encoding the lyrics would obfuscate the lyrics in the
source when someone tried viewing source to get a round the right-click
handler.

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

I think I am on the correct track.

Copy-protection might indeed be the explanation.

There is JavaScript disabling the
right-click so encoding the lyrics would obfuscate the lyrics in the
source when someone tried viewing source to get a round the right-click
handler.

So do you mean that you have to ***gasp*** disable JavaScript to
override this ingenious high-tech copy protection system?

(There's some irony in the attempt to prevent copying on a site that has
probably copied its own content mostly illegally.)

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

Copy-protection might indeed be the explanation.


So do you mean that you have to ***gasp*** disable JavaScript to
override this ingenious high-tech copy protection system?

Yes sad isn't it?

(There's some irony in the attempt to prevent copying on a site that has
probably copied its own content mostly illegally.)

That too!

 

[Ray_Net]

Yes sad isn't it?


That too!

I just rigth-click on the text, choice "This frame" then "View Frame
source" using SeaMonkey browser (a firefox flavor) and i got :

id="lyrics">I need another story<br>
Something to get off my chest<br>
My life gets kinda boring<br>
Need something that I can confess<br>
<br>
'Til all my sleeves are stained red<br>
From all the truth that I've said<br>
Come by it honestly I swear<br>
Thought you saw me wink, no<br>

I've been on the brink, so<br>
bla-bla-bla

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

I just rigth-click on the text, choice "This frame" then "View Frame
source" using SeaMonkey browser (a firefox flavor) and i got :

You have JavaScript disabled, else you cannot right-click to view "This
frame". I am using SeaMonkey 2.4.1

 

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:31:54 -0400, /Jonathan N. Little/:

You have JavaScript disabled, else you cannot right-click to view
"This frame". I am using SeaMonkey 2.4.1

I don't have JavaScript disabled, but I have Edit -> Preferences:

Advanced / Scripts & Plugins:

Allow scripts to:
[ ] Disable or replace context menus

(unchecked)

 

[cwdjrxyz]

In a vain attempt to prevent copying the lyrics...

I just usually use Gadwin Print Screen to save something of this sort
to a file or print it out. You can select an area of the screen to
capture so that you do not have to go to some other image program to
clip out the portion of the full screen that you wish. Gadwin Print
Screen may not work on some OSs, but there are likely other programs
that will.

Javascript based scramble methods go back at least to IE4 and NN4
days. Of course there were even then easy ways to get around them.
Some urls are:

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex9/encrypter.htm

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex9/noright.htm
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex9/noright2.htm
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex9/noright3.htm

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

I don't have JavaScript disabled, but I have Edit -> Preferences:

Advanced / Scripts & Plugins:

Allow scripts to:
[ ] Disable or replace context menus

(unchecked)

Forgot about that setting. Back in the day when SeaMonkey was Mozilla
and older Communicator the advanced settings did not have that option

 

[Ray_Net]

You have JavaScript disabled, else you cannot right-click to view "This
frame". I am using SeaMonkey 2.4.1

Correct ! yes and no. I have the java plugin disabled.
BUT, on a personal page i have javascript to perform some functions -
and this is working ok. So my javascript is not disabled.

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

Correct ! yes and no. I have the java plugin disabled.
Ditto

BUT, on a personal page i have javascript to perform some functions -
and this is working ok. So my javascript is not disabled.

But then as Stanimir pointed out you must have the advance setting
"Preferences > Advance > Scripts & Plugins > Disable or replace context
menus" unchecked, otherwise the site's JavaScript would have blocked
your right-click menu.

 

[Ray_Net]

But then as Stanimir pointed out you must have the advance setting
"Preferences > Advance > Scripts & Plugins > Disable or replace context
menus" unchecked, otherwise the site's JavaScript would have blocked
your right-click menu.

Correct ! You are the best !

 

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

You have JavaScript disabled, else you cannot right-click to view "This
frame". I am using SeaMonkey 2.4.1

I don't have JavaScript disabled, but all I need to do is select the
text, copy it, and paste it into a text editor. That's it. I don't know
if that wotks in all browsers, but it works just fine in mine (iCab).
The only effect I can see is that it makes the page about five times
slower to load.

 

[P E Schoen]

"Jonathan N. Little" wrote in message

In a vain attempt to prevent copying the lyrics...

I found that saving it "As HTML" from IE9 converts the escape characters to
plain text, and then you can just extract that (which includes the HTML tags
for formatting).

It is effective for keeping the usual customers from lifting the content
easily.

Paul