[thelist] Staving Off Photo Thieves

[John Dowdell]

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?

Screen captures see all, but many perpetrators won't go to the trouble to
learn how to do it, to check compression on the results, etc. You might
make it more expensive for them to swipe your content....

It sounds like they already have the content, which implies that the
products themselves are commodities which are regularly refreshed with new
models. One path might be to speak to the common supplier.

Another path, a bit more controversial, takes advantage of how they can't
control your website, just as you can't control theirs. Depending on your
customers, you might consider providing a link that explains what that
competitor is doing. You then have a quid-pro-quo to bargain with.

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.

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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