Boz asked:
> What can I do against this:
> http://cgi.ebay.de/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1334153963
>
>
> I don't mean legally, but I would appreciate ideas on how to place the
> copyright notices so that they are not so easy to remove. Am I dreaming
> when thinking of images that do not allow themselves to be
> screencaptured and edited?
Short answer: yes, you're dreaming. Other people have given
better advice than I can on legal and social approaches to the
problem; my comments are on the technical side.
There's no really good technical solution. There are techniques
to make theft of the images a little more difficult (the "my car
only has to be harder to steal than my neighbour's car, not
invulnerable" approach). The harder you make it to steal the
images, the more you interfere with legitimate viewing of them.
So what you want, as with _any_ computer-security issue, is to
find a useful and reasonable compromise between the cost (in
money, effort, and inconvenience) and effectiveness of the
security measures you choose.
Putting copyright notices along the edges of an image does very
little to distract from the image and does not reduce the
quality of it. It's also easy to defeat by cropping the image.
It _does_ mean that anyone who takes the image directly from
your site can't claim ignorance of its copyright status, but all
they have to do is claim that they stole it from someone else
who'd already filed off the copyright notice (*and* claim to be
ignorant of copyright law in general!).
Putting an invisible digital watermark in the image allows you
to prove that the image is yours as long as the thief doesn't
know how to check for it and remove it, but does little to
discourage an ignorant thief from using your work.
Putting a visible but faint watermark across the whole image is
harder to remove (I'm betting that someone with better Photoshop
skills than I have can undo it -- *if* they decide that it's
worth that much effort instead of finding someone else to rip
off) but diminishes the usefulness of the image to legitimate
users (i.e. viewers of your web site). The question becomes,
"How *badly* do you feel that compromises the usefulness of your
site?" If the answer is, "Well that's unfortunate but not a
show-stopper", and theft of your work is a bigger deal than
that, then there's your answer.
Cleverly editing the copyright notice in place of the serial
number is a lot more work on your end, and can be undone by
anyone who knows Photoshop as well as you do. (Unless, of
course, they decide it's easier to steal from someone else...)
It does less to diminish the information-usefulness of the image
than the visible watermark.
(If most of the theft is for eBay listings, putting "Not For
Sale!" in the watermark might also be a nice touch...)
I suggest not trying Javascript code to stop folks from
downloading images. First, for them to _see_ the image, it
_has_ been transmitted to their computer; they just need to know
a little more to be able to save it, but it's already in memory
(and possibly on disk in the cache) on their system. If nothing
else, a screen-capture program will get it. Second, such little
gain is probably not worth the cost to legitimate users: anyone
using a non-Javascript-capable browser or who turns off
Javascript for performance or security reasons can no longer use
your site. (FWIW, I'm in the latter category.)
Those cover people copying your images. My recommendation is to
go with a simple copyright notice and rely on social and legal
measures to deal with theft as you discover it.
Now as for people linking directly to your images instead of
copying them, there are some tricks ... it comes down to a
question of how much effort it's worth. Someone else suggested
renaming images and replacing them with a blank image (or, what
I'd be inclined to do, an image of a sign saying, "The picture
that was supposed to be here was stolen from...", or maybe a
photo of a camera that has been smashed to bits). Well that's
an after-the-fact, _reactive_ approach (which is also true of
legal solutions, notifying eBay of offenses, etc.). To do this
proactively, you could perhaps use a server-side script which
concocts a new filename each time the page is loaded (or one
which changes based on the date/time), and configure the server
so that any requests for an expired filename return the "this
image was stolen" picture. It has to be server-side so that the
actual filename of the permanent image is not exposed.
If the big problem you run into is folks linking in to your
images, this ought to discourage that (at the expense of more
coding on your end, and more load on your web server (though if
your pages are already coming out of a database, this probably
isn't a huge increase percentagewise)). It doesn't stop them
from _copying_ the images, of course, and I'm pretty sure I
could come up with a chunk of Java or Javascript code to snarf
the filename-of-the-moment on the fly once I teach myself either
of those languages (the algorithm is forming in my head as I
write). OTOH, writing Javascript to do that is harder than just
copying the image and storing it elsewhere, so you probably
don't have to worry about that particular hack.
You might also be able to hack your server to serve up different
images depending on the "Referrer" tag in the HTTP request from
the browser. I'm not sure how easy that is to defeat, nor am I
sure whether that would break for any legitimate viewers.
There's your long answer. To recap: the short answer is that
there are no really good _technical_ solutions, though there are
techniques which may help a little. I really think that the
main thrust of your anti-theft efforts, if you want to seriously
protect your intellectual property, is going to have to hinge on
writing letters after the fact.
(Education in the form of a notice reminding people what
copyright means may help, but only if you get them to actually
read the notice.)
As someone else pointed out, theft of your work is a result of
your having put together something so incredibly useful /
valuable. I'm not going to say, "You should be flattered." I'm
going to say, "This is an unfortunate side effect of the great
job you've done, and it's going to take more than technical
approaches to deal with it."
Good luck.
-- Glenn
-
This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe,
go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to
visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
