And really these things are sooo easy to bypass – no need to worry about disabling JavaScript – as long as the image fits on your screen: use screen capture (and there are numerous free tools that allow to capture only a part of the screen, doing away with the need to crop the picture afterwards). This also works with pics embedded in flash .. or anything actually

Try using Google’s option to print the map. It decides you don’t want the satellite image, but the road map. Duh? So, you have to use Alt-Print-Scrn and crop the thing and print it using some image processing app. This is making things easy.

I dare not mention Ordnance Survey and how ‘easy’ they have made it to print a map (that the fricking taxpayer already paid for).

Thanks for the comment. Could you let me know – did you actually click on the ‘Enlarge’ link on this page? And then right-click on the enlarged image?

Doing a bit more experimentation, it is true that the Javascript ‘protection’ doesn’t seem particularly robust. E.g. in IE6, the right-click menu does not appear, but the little ‘Picture toolbar’ does eventually appear (and allow you to save/print etc as you say).

That seems to suggest a misguided/poorly implemented system (as Aaron notes) rather than a really serious attempt to prevent the user copying the image, and I apologise if my comments were a little harsh. But I still don’t see why any kind of restriction – whether effective or not – is needed.

Noneof2′s instructions above are great for circumventing this kind of restriction when you come across it elsewhere, and where it’s more robustly implemented.

Vera’s comment, and Geoff’s mention of the OnOneMap / Environment Agency flood data débâcle illustrate something even worse about the tendency of public bodies to lock up publicly funded data: the often complete intransigence when faced with people who want to build on the information or use it in a way which is (often more) beneficial to the public. On the subject of image collections again, Frankie Roberto points to Public Resource’s eloquent criticism (and subversion) of the Smithsonian’s restrictions on its online image library.

First up stumbled on this by accident and as I work for EH I thought I would try it out. I tried to access the image at work fine no problem it worked perfectly with a right click. Then I thought perhaps thats because I am logged on at work so here I am this morning on my own PC very basic and again no problems with the Datchet image or with a couple of others. Right clicked saved to desk top and it would email and print from there if I wanted to.
By the way very pleased to have made acquaintenance with your blog as a non techie I hope to return and try to learn something more.

Best regards
Paddy

There are always ways to beat these b*stards at their own games.

As for getting around this kind of insipid and stupid DRM, it’s easy. One way is to use Firefox. Tools menu, Options, Content, enable Javascript, and “Advanced…” and uncheck all the evil things (move, resize, disable or replace context menus, mess with the status bar…) — right click should now work. Also, sites should no longer be able to mislead you as to where a link is going by blocking the destination URL appearing in the status bar when you point at the link, which is important for detecting some outright evil things, including bogus links on phishing sites.

A second method is to simply zoom the image and hit print-screen. Open photoshop, hit paste, and crop the windows-cruft out from around the image of interest. (This also often works to get at some other DRMed stuff. Individual video frames from a DVD for instance. It’s also useful for capturing modal dialogs or error messages or EULA text that isn’t selectable for copying to the clipboard, so you can later transcribe it easily or otherwise reference it or use it. Print screen and Firefox – saving a little bit of our few remaining fair use rights every day.)

See http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,2118152,00.html

I could understand if they were just stopping massive downloads of their images, but disabling right click is a little excessive. God forbid I want to save a whole dozen of these images one-by-one.

On a side note, I love how, in my browser, the Javascript alert appears after I’ve right clicked and save the image.

Many of us bemoan the paucity of culture on the web. We tend to be very familiar with the endless copyright wrangles relating to, for example, films. Most of us do not realize that our primary custodial institutions are yet so far removed from this new electronic world we inhabit as to be another species or on another planet. Yet it is, as you say, our cultural history.

The quality of print information available online increases with time (despite the attendant volume of drek) yet the availability of images stagnates in comparison.

(end rant )

Vera