[thelist] Graphics: Protecting Original Photography

Viveka me at karmanaut.com
Sun Aug 25 19:44:01 CDT 2002


If it can be displayed, it can be copied.

Sometimes I wonder why this suddenly becomes an issue on the web.
After all, if a photographer allows their photographs to be published
in a book, they can be scanned and republished, at a far higher
quality than any image on the web.

I also get this in 3D work. Manufacturers say "I want my Web3D model
to be copy-protected, so that people don't download it, import the
file into a CAD program, and manufacture a copy of my object". We're
talking here about a low-polygon mesh object - the equivalent of a
low-res 8 bit image. Meanwhile they will happily sell their object in
shops and allow it to be photographed for  publicity, without a
thought that someone could scan the photographs and construct a CAD
replica using photogrammetry, or that they could put the object in a
3D scanner; either method providing a much more high-fidelity copy
than a Web3D model.

The strongest protection against copyright infringement is copyright
law. An invisible watermark might (if it hasn't been removed) assist
you in proving your case, but prior publication would be stronger
proof.

Invisible watermarks and steganography are the same thing; modifying
the least significant bit of your pixels in order to encode
supplementary information. Either can be obliterated by running the
image through another steganography pass.

I seem to recall that .gif and .jpg have metadata fields where you
can add information such as author/creator/copyright, but I've
forgotten how to access that information. This might be a
cheaper/simpler way to provide the evidentiary function that
watermarking has.

Regards,

V.
--
Viveka Weiley, Karmanaut.
{ http://www.karmanaut.com | http://www.planet-earth.org
    http://www.MacWeb3D.org | http://sydney.siggraph.org.au }
Hypermedia, virtual worlds, human interface, truth, beauty.



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