Sharing is ethical only through corporate approved channels!

Don't think it can. The copy paste function is a function of the operating system not the application.

Applications (and websites) can definitely allow / deny copy/paste into specific text fields; I'm not sure if they could disable it for the entire browser as a whole but I can't imagine they'd ever do so even if it's possible.

Maybe not completely 100% locked down, but what about making it difficult to access for non-technical users? Also what about chrome mobile browsers? On mobile it is much easier to block copy and paste right?

Clipboard is provided by the OS, but application chooses how to integrate with it.

When you select text and hit ctrl-c or click copy in the context menu, it's all done by the application. And it may choose to remove/disable this feature.

Absolutely started happening on mobile websites. And actually it's the only reason I use AI at the moment. If I see something I want to copy I hold down my O button till ai pops up then I draw a circle around the text. AI pops it into a search field for me. Haven't found a way to do this on PC yet but F12 exists and in still handy with that

That's just Optical Character Recognition, you don't need AI for it. Search 'OCR' plus your operating system...

There are extensions to enable copy/paste when a website has disabled them. I've been using Don't Fuck With Paste (Github) for a long time and it mostly works but it hasn't been updated in years. There are other options in the Chrome store.

At most they could maybe remove it for Chrome users. But unless Google is going to start editing 3rd party websites, I don't see how they could remove copy/paste entirely.

More to the point, why would they?

More to the point, why would they?

Why wouldn't they want more direct control over how content is shared online? They control essentially the only web browser and the internet is more centralized under a few corporations than it ever has been....

Well because it would be akin to taking away the ability to right click from an operating system. It's been basic functionality for many years and would enrage hundreds of millions of users and drive them to another browser over night.

What other browser?

Firefox, one of its forks, or one of the up and coming ones. Or webkit based ones. Or if on apple, safari.

Are you comfortable actually pointing to those as realistic alternatives for most everybody?

I see endless rows of corporate silos and a couple of niche little hobbiest communities off to the side, I do not see an environment where corporations can't do whatever the hell they want.

Don't get me wrong, I hope I am wrong, but I don't think I am.

Absolutely yes. I would recommend Firefox to any and every person complaining about chrome. And for times they have to use chrome, there are alternatives that do various amounts of degoogling. Almost certainly one would be able to reinstate copy/paste.

To satisfy your overthinking urges.

Firefox is a perfectly good alternative. Works just as well as chrome.

Never. So many things would break.

That's like picking fights with strangers to manage your anger.

They would 1st enforce DRM and other security features before doing that. Stuff like Manifest V3 and others will continue to restrict use and addon access making them less user friendly than before.

That's exactly what some jerks do.

All modern OCR engine use neural networks. Specialised OCR will not hallucinate like generalist multimodal LLM, but they absolutely are AI.

Same reason I sometimes imagine the stupidest possible comments on my comments and how I would react

Buddy where do you think you are?

I see the irony is lost on you.

Well, that's happens sometimes with everyone. Don't see a problem with it. 🙃

Screen capture and OCR. It’s not a perfect solution, but vendors send me locked PDF docs often enough that I have to get datum from that I’ve done it a few times.

Never? Don't be stupid

That will come after they suddenly announce they're making Chromium closed source only, with the help of genAI.

Don't be naive

For a start, the W3C would never agree to it

For a second, the internet is international, they could probably get away with it in the USA, but EU would shut them down QUICK