[thelist] Staving Off Photo Thieves

[Shirley Kaiser, SKDesigns]

At 03:16 PM 04/27/2001, John Dowdell wrote:
>At 7:49 PM 4/26/1, Rachell Coe wrote:
> > I have a client whose product pictures keep getting taken by
> > their competitors.  In this situation, what is the best thing to
> > do about it?
>
>If the perps are actually linking to your server, then it's always fun to
>suddenly change the content at the path they're linking to.

Yes, it is indeed fun. <chuckle> I've used this approach with incredibly 
effective results. They have swiftly removed the link every single time.

In terms of outright stealing images not linked to one's server, one of my 
good friends and colleagues had her entire site stolen by another designer 
who was passing it off as his own work for his own web design business 
site. The FBI is now involved in the case, and they are taking legal action 
against him. I was thrilled to see that the authorities are taking such 
things seriously. My colleague friend is also a Canadian citizen living in 
Canada, while the person who stole her work is a US citizen living in San 
Francisco.

So we're certainly coming a long way with protecting our work. Many ISPs 
will also remove someone's account from their server if you can provide 
sufficient proof that their user has stolen your work.

Those are just a couple of things I've seen that are working.

Many people don't realize that they CAN get caught. The more we do things, 
the more the word will spread that they can get caught AND that legal 
action really can be taken. Unfortunately, so many people don't take 
copyright issues seriously, combined with this attitude that you can snatch 
whatever you want off the Internet.

>SWF isn't really intended for bitmaps, but it's possible to make SWFs which
>check their location and which display embarrassing messages if there's an
>attempt to swipe them.
>
>
>One cute approach, which I haven't seen described elsewhere:
>
>1)  Open photo in Fireworks etc.
>
>2)  Type "STOP STEALING MY IMAGES" or whatever, large.
>
>3)  Use this message text as a mask, export.
>
>4)  Invert the mask, export this complementary image.
>
>5)  Arrange these two images in DIVs, one atop the other.
>
>Result: In the browser the two pieces in the overlaid DIVs will fit
>together and show the normal image. If they try to save the image, though,
>they'll likely just get the top one, with the content obscured by the
>hidden message.
>
>Won't stop all of 'em, but will befuddle at least some of 'em.... ;-)
>
>jd
>
>John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US
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John, I love this idea, too! Great one. I'm saving this one in my important 
tips folder. :-)  thanks.

Warmly,
Shirley
--
Shirley E. Kaiser, M.A.
SKDesigns  mailto:skaiser at skdesigns.com
Website Development  http://www.skdesigns.com/
Pianist, Composer  http://www.shirleykaiser.com/
Moderator, I-Design http://www.adventive.com/lists/idesign/summary.html