How to Copy Text From Any Website — Unlock Copy & Paste on Sites That Block It

You found the exact paragraph you were looking for. You highlight it — and nothing happens. You try right-clicking — no menu appears. You hit Ctrl+C — nothing copies. The text is sitting right there on your screen, but the website has quietly decided you're not allowed to have it.

Why websites block copy and paste

It's one of the most annoying things on the web, and it happens way more often than it should. The reasons sites do this vary. Some publishers think copy-protection keeps their content from being scraped or plagiarised. Some e-commerce sites don't want you copying product details to compare prices elsewhere. Some paywalled platforms block selection to discourage sharing. A few just do it out of habit — someone once saw another site do it and copied the pattern without really thinking about why.

Here's the thing: in almost every case, the restriction hits real people a lot harder than it stops scrapers or bad actors, who have far more effective tools at their disposal anyway. Copy protection punishes legitimate users, not bots.

What actually gets blocked

There's no single way websites block copying — they usually stack a few techniques at once, which is why simple workarounds often fail. The most common approaches:

• CSS user-select: none — a single CSS rule that stops the browser from letting you highlight text at all
• JavaScript event listeners — scripts that intercept keydown, copy, and selectstart events and cancel them before they do anything
• Disabled right-click — a contextmenu handler that stops the browser menu from appearing
• Clipboard watermarking — the sneakiest one: you can copy, but the site silently appends a source URL or tracking text to your clipboard without telling you

Workarounds like "view source," browser reader mode, or disabling JavaScript manually can work in specific cases — but they're slow, they break the page, and they don't handle clipboard watermarking at all.

The fix: JustCopy

JustCopy is a free Chrome extension built to handle all of these techniques in one place. It removes CSS selection restrictions, re-enables keyboard shortcuts, restores the right-click menu, and blocks clipboard watermarking — all without touching anything it doesn't need to.

It's off by default. It does absolutely nothing until you turn it on for the specific page you're on. That means it never interferes with sites that already work fine, and you only reach for it when you actually hit a wall.

How to use it — step by step

1. Install JustCopy. Add JustCopy from the Chrome Web Store — free, no account, no signup.
2. Go to the page that blocks copying. Navigate to the website where text selection, right-click, or keyboard shortcuts are blocked.
3. Click the JustCopy icon and flip the toggle. One toggle enables it for the current page. The page reloads with all restrictions removed.
4. Copy like normal. Select text, right-click, hit Ctrl+C — everything works the way it was supposed to. Your clipboard contains exactly what you selected.

The clipboard watermark problem

This one deserves its own mention because most people don't even know it's happening. Many news sites, content platforms, and documentation pages silently intercept your copy action and modify your clipboard before you notice. When you paste elsewhere, you get your text — plus a source URL or tracking string that wasn't there. Sometimes it's appended at the end, sometimes it's slipped directly into the middle of what you copied. This is sometimes called clipboard hijacking or watermarking, and it happens through a copy event listener that fires before the browser finalises what actually goes to your clipboard.

JustCopy blocks this entirely. The copy event listener is intercepted before the site's script can modify your clipboard. What you copy is exactly what you selected — nothing added, nothing changed.

Get the extension

JustCopy is free and available now on the Chrome Web Store — no payment, no account, no data collection. Everything runs locally in your browser.

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