Add a Copyright Notice to Copied Text

I was checking out the CBC website and I noticed that if you copy and paste any text from the site a reference link appears at the bottom, indicating the source. I thought that was kind of neat and tried to figure out how to do it. Turns out, they use a service called Tynt. That’s cool and all, but I wanted to see if I could make it happen using JavaScript. All I needed my function to do was grab the copied selection, tack on a copyright notice and then add the two to the clipboard.

It took a lot of messing around and I was finally able to put something together that worked in most browsers. Sorry IE people, this one won’t work for you, though if anyone figures out a fix for IE let me know. Then the function will work for all major browsers.

Here is the JavaScript:

<script type="text/javascript">
function addLink() {
	var body_element = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0];
	var selection;
	selection = window.getSelection();
	var pagelink = "<br /><br /> Read more at: <a href='"+document.location.href+"'>"+document.location.href+"</a><br />Copyright &copy; c.bavota"; // change this if you want
	var copytext = selection + pagelink;
	var newdiv = document.createElement('div');
	newdiv.style.position='absolute';
	newdiv.style.left='-99999px';
	body_element.appendChild(newdiv);
	newdiv.innerHTML = copytext;
	selection.selectAllChildren(newdiv);
	window.setTimeout(function() {
		body_element.removeChild(newdiv);
	},0);
}
document.oncopy = addLink;
</script>

Just add this between your page’s head tags, and change the copyright notice to whatever you want.

Demo

To test it out, copy something from the paragraph below and paste it into your favorite text editor.