As a web designer or graphic artist you want your work to be seen and appreciated, but don't want it to be purloined and someone else to get the credit for your hard work. A quick search on the WWW, or a basic knowledge of Javascript and lo! you have the facility to disable the right click functionality and safeguard the fruits of your labour.

Well all seems fine and dandy, but you may just have alienated a proportion of your potential audience. Using the right-click has more functionality than just 'stealing' your work, and some users will not appreciate being told how they are allowed to interact with your site.

The stateless nature of the hypertext transfer protocol requires that all the content of your web-page is downloaded and cached by the client computer - so trying to stop your user from saving your content is completely counter to all that the internet relies upon.

Even taking precautions such as the ubiquitous JavaScript option are so easily by-passed as to make the effort worthless. Consider the user (and there are lots of them) who have disabled JavaScript...

Even for the average user, just try the following:

Press and HOLD the right mouse button. The alert box will appear.

Press the Enter button and release. The alert box will disappear.

Release the right mouse button and the context menu appears.

Magic!

Just accept it - putting your work onto the WWW requires a certain willingness to let others see how you have acheived the results.