Online radio station threatens blogger

Found on The JemReport on Saturday, 19 May 2007
Browse Legal-Issues

Internet radio station Atlanta Blue Skye LLC has warned Radu-Cristian Fotescu, a Romania-based technology enthusiast and prolific blogger, that his Beranger.org blog has been "copied" and turned over to its lawyers. The issue stems from Fotescu's posting of a widely known workaround for bypassing JavaScript functions that try to disable a mouse's right-click context menu functionality, and the posting of information gathered from the Properties function of Windows Media Player.

In an attempt to prevent copying the stream URL into another music player, Atlanta Blue Skye LLC Web developers employed an old JavaScript trick to prevent users from accessing the context popup menu by disabling the ability to right-click on any elements of the radio stream's Web page.

Bypassing the right-click disabling function is arguably as old as the function itself, and is well-documented on the Web. By using the Esc key workaround, Fotescu was able to access the Web browser's context menu and discover the new stream URLs and posted both the addresses and the one-sentence procedure for bypassing the JavaScript right-click disabling function on his Beranger.org blog.

Counter-sue for stupidity? If you rely on Javascript, your spiffy business plan has failed. Some disable it while others (like me) filter and alter it through a proxy to get rid of the annoying stuff.