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It's only tangentially related, but I had to make a comment: http://www.economist.com/comment/1835110#comment-1835110

I happily pay for my subscription to The Economist and enjoy reading it on my iPad. But they don't even allow you to select a single word in an article, which would make it possible to look things up in a dictionary.

This kind of limitation to attempt enforcement of copyright is part of the whole problem right now.




Oh, that's not a copyright thing. It's more "you must be this tall to ride this ride." The Economist is snooty; if you need to look up the words, they don't want you.


I doubt that they do it to prevent copying. I can access every article from the newspaper on their website as nicely formated HTML.


You have to go out of your way when writing an iOS app to prevent selection/copy in text views. They had to at least think about it.


Or they just don't use standard text views and didn't go out of their way to re-enable it. Back in the early days of OS X, you'd see a lot of controls that looked like the real thing but acted in subtly different ways because they were re-implementations to add some minor feature.




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