I'm curious if anyone has an experience in protecting a web-based interface from being "front-ended" by others for their own gain.

Say I spent a good amount of time and money to develop a site that sells "ProductX". Someone then reverse engineers my HTML form->submit process and creates their own front-end, secretly adding an upcharge to the customer. They also change all references to ProductX to ProductY, so I may not be able to manually search for and identify who's screen scraping.

What I've thought of:

• Dynamically changing form element names, perhaps tied to a Digest::MD5 hash of the session key. Might help, but they could still guess some of that based on the provided values of the form elements.
• Having the user type in text that matches what's displayed in a .gif image. ( See This pretty cool node from jcwren on defeating this sort of thing ). This bothers me, because I'm making the customer jump through hoops to buy something
• Analyze web logs to find those people taking an odd path through the site. ( skipping intro pages ). Turns out this isn't useful, since there so much client-side caching.

Any other ideas ? Any modules that might help me ?

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