How to protect my GSAP animation code?

[galahad9gr]

Question regarding IP of animations...

 

Hello everybody

 

I spent 30 hours on an animation, which has got not too shabby at all. =)

How can I make sure that the animation code is not used without permission

by other people right after they right-click on my website and copy paste it out?

 

Is there a way to secure/protect the .JS containing the GSAP code or

is it basically "fair game" for copycats?

 

Best regards,

Matt

[retropunk]

There are plenty of JS Obfuscators around that will absolutely make it much harder for people to get at your code.

I would start there and see how it goes.

I've never used one so I'd be interested in hearing how it goes.

 

Good luck!

[Rodrigo]

Hey Matt,

 

Well, the issue in this type of situation is that, since JS is read, interpreted and executed on the browser, there's basically no absolute way of preventing others to use your code.

 

As Patrick mentions, using minification and obfuscation is one way to prevent others to access your code. Another way is use regular expressions and check the url against those in order to see if the domain matches that regular expression. If not you can redirect the user to google or something like that. The good thing about that is that regular expressions are a common thing in almost any language, so it wouldn't be too noticeable to hide it in an anonymous IIFE in the middle of your code.

 

As I believe that there's no 100% bullet-proof method, using minification and perhaps another technique will protect your work, since more advanced coders (which could be the ones with the time and resources to go through your code and see how things are done) would probably create their own versions of what you have done.

 

I've never used an obfuscator, just minified my code using grunt so I can't tell you about that, but here are some links:

 

https://javascriptobfuscator.com/Javascript-Obfuscator.aspx

 

http://www.danstools.com/javascript-obfuscate/

 

https://jscrambler.com/en/

[OSUblake]

I'd say it's not worth your time worrying about. It's going to take somebody all of 30 seconds to copy and paste your code into a deobfuscator, turning it into a human readable format. But who's really going to copy animation code? Maybe somebody from India. Good luck in trying to get them to take it down.

[Guest Arun]

I'd say it's not worth your time worrying about. It's going to take somebody all of 30 seconds to copy and paste your code into a deobfuscator, turning it into a human readable format. But who's really going to copy animation code? Maybe somebody from India. Good luck in trying to get them to take it down.

 

I'm someone from India, so beware    .

 

Sorry to see @OSUblake for having such a perception on Indians. Its my 3rd week and countless hours trying my hands-on with GSAP and such a wonderful forum. Even though I'm very new to scripting, I think, I'm learning Js through my experiments with GSAP(and threejs). In these many hours, I haven't thought of copying any code for my personal benefit. Hope this helps you to change your perception about Indians.

 

Cheers.

[OSUblake]

My bad @Arun,

 

I wasn't trying to pick on India. I was just using it as an example of how IP theft is usually an international issue that is very hard to enforce. That's why I personally don't worry about it too much.

[dalisoft]

Good way protect your code is give them license like GPLv3 with your note that restricted to copy. But i don't sure, it works or no. Script encoders is slow-down PC and Animations too, no matter with what engine/animation maked. Many advanced dev's knows how-to decode code without leaving current tab, i seen like that like hackers, but i'm not one. But Thanks to GSAP, i did own many libraries and projects. Thanks