How Tynt works - Technical details

The idea of Tynt is simple and effective - whenever stuff is copied from your site, track it and insert a small link-back to your website. It may now be a 100% effective, but the idea would work for people who don't play around with the content that is copied. This post describes how they track stuff that is copied and some enhancements that I think would be useful.
Preventing text to be copied from a website has been around for ages. The onCopy method gives us a handler just before content is copied allowing the actual copied text to be manipulated. The tynt site requires us to insert a script that registers handlers. Here is the step by step explanation, once their script loads on our website.

1. Register handlers for onCopy, onDrag, etc on the window Object
2. Get a unique URL that will be used as a tracker
3. When any of the registered event occurs
1. Send an event to the server
2. On firefox, create a new node with the data that has to be displayed with the content that is copied. Set selection to existing node and this new node.
   
3. On IE, add extra text to the current Selection
4. Cancel the propagation of the current event.
   

This works fine for most websites as not many use the on copy event. However, i find the text that is appended to the existing selection a little too obtrusively. Instead of adding such huge content, it would be easy if a simple image is included, with all the links on the image. The image still can be removed, but in my opinion, the chances that a simple small image would be ignored instead of such a huge block of text is high. The image can also serve as a pointer to the places where the copied content travels. There should also be some attribution text added when the client to which content is copied does not support rich text. Something simple in braces should do the job.
As for how the analysis was done, all I had to do was use Fiddler to load a formatted version of Tracer.js?user= to understand the code. Then I had to check out the eventHandlers that led me to handleTracing(). The function has a could of inline functions and one of them, called H() is responsible for replacing the text.
To summarize, the idea is nice but it is the javascript implementaion that stole my attention. :)