507356 - I should be able to prevent selection disabling

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 167396

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Matthew Smith]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090717 Fedora/3.5.1-1.fc11 Firefox/3.5.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090717 Fedora/3.5.1-1.fc11 Firefox/3.5.1

This website has some JavaScript which disables the mouse selection.  The script is as follows:

<script type="text/javascript">
/***************************************************************************************************************
*Copyprotection for this site is provided by WP-CopyProtect v1.9 visit www.TheChetan.com/wp-copyprotect/ for more details
*Selection Disabled, Please DO NOT COPY.
**************************************************************************************************************/
function disableSelection(target){
if (typeof target.onselectstart!="undefined") //For IE 
	target.onselectstart=function(){return false}
else if (typeof target.style.MozUserSelect!="undefined") //For Firefox
	target.style.MozUserSelect="none"
else //All other route (For Opera)
	target.onmousedown=function(){return false}
target.style.cursor = "default"
}

</script>

This causes Firefox to prevent me from selecting any of the content.  This is undesirable it interferes with the fair use of the content, e.g. quoting short excerpts in order to comment on it.  As with other "copy protection" techniques, such as right-click blocking, it does not actually prevent copying anyway, as I can view the source of the website and copy that (or just disable JavaScript for the duration), or just copy the text manually.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load the website
2. Move the mouse over any part of the page and observe the cursor, which will remain a pointer, not a text selection cursor
3. Attempt to select any text; nothing will happen.
Actual Results:  
See "steps to reproduce"


There should be an option in the JavaScript advanced preferences to disable this behaviour, as with right-click blocking and window resizing.

Comment 1

[Dave Garrett]

I tend to agree.

Duplicate of bug 363162, bug 167396.