[thelist] Staving Off Photo Thieves

[aardvark]

> From: Rachell Coe <rachell at coeville.com>
> 
> 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?  I've recommended digimarcing all of the photo's and then
> threatening legal action to those who are using them without
> permission -- but is that their only recourse?  The client said that
> they have heard of some type of scripting that can be used on the
> graphics to make it so that you cannot download them to your hard
> drive -- does anyone know what this is and how effective it is?

show me a site that tries to prevent  mr from taking its images via 
scripting, and i'll show you a stack of pictures i've just stolen from 
that site... in short, if someone wants them bad enough, they're 
gonna get 'em... the only way to prevent is to not put them on the 
server...

now, that being said, digimarc is nice, but none of the customers 
seeing them know they're stolen (digimarc is, after all, invisible), 
and it comes with all sorts of hassle since your model is based on 
suing them... skip it...

instead, use visible watermarks... over key parts of the images... 
that way some slug will have to spend a hella lotta time trying to 
clone it out... as an example, look at the photos on my site, like 
the ones at http://roselli.org/adrian/photos/an2.asp... sure, they 
can be cropped out, but then the image is kinda messed up... and 
if i move the text into the main part of the image, the image is still 
effective, but the text can't be removed in a cost-effective manner...

never understimate the power of brute force...