You can prevent such nonsense in Firefox by disabling JavaScript clipboard events by setting dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled to false in about:config.

Select all -> Copy is working fine for me using firefox on android mobile, at least.

You can do this kind of JS fuckery and overwrite the default copy behaviour.

document.addEventListener("copy", (event) => {
  event.clipboardData.setData(
    "text/plain",
    "This is the text that will actually be pasted!"
  );

  event.preventDefault();
});

Though I would always consider this super hostile design. The only sane place where something like this should be is a copy button you can click to automatically copy something into the clipboard.

This is definitely entirely unrelated to the AI ecosystem. It doesn't stop scraping, and nobody with any experience in the industry would think it does. I don't know why they created this feature, but it has nothing to do with LLMs.

Wow what asshole design. Never come across that before. On iOS you can freely copy any text selection in reader mode in Safari. Perhaps something similar could work on android.

You got one correct answer to the question asked, which is "why". And it has nothing to do with AI. This has been a thing on websites for 20 years - not many, but some. They use javascript to choose what to copy to the clipboard. As others noted, there are ways around it.

For the why? Well, to try and prevent precisely what you were doing.

There are ways of making it more difficult (impossible for the average or lightly-teched user) to save/copy images, for example. Some sites attempt to do that.

It's all a matter of trying to protect what they've published. Which is certainly legally their right. But is also pretty easy to get around - at least on desktop. I haven't had to bother on mobile, myself.

It looks like you can copy snippets that don't include an end-of-paragraph.

I don't like it either, but I would guess this was supposed to be a feature, a benefit, not a way to prevent AI scraping. I don't think it would prevent AI scraping.

I don't know how it works, but I've had similar with economictimes.indiatimes.com and it's on pc too, just copies a few words and then "read more at Https....

Yeah that’s crazy. Funnily enough though on iOS Safari I can select the text I want, then drag it to a text field in another app. I could also screenshot the text and grab it from the screenshot if I were that interested.

Firefox mobile + reader view = problem solved

i can copy anything from there on fennec with ublock