followup on "how to protect images"

[mdjo]

Okay, you closed the thread, but I want to get my 2 cents in anyway ...

1. I don't understand why people go through all this discussion of mailing something to yourself so you can use the postmark as proof of date of creation. A few years back I came across an article on the web by someone who said that he kept a notebook of his various creative works, with each page dated and signed by an associate, and with blank spaces on the page blocked out. And I thought: So what? What could that possibly prove in court? If he was going to lie, he'd just have to leave one page half-blank, not block it out, and then later when he had stolen whatever work, go fill it in on that page. The fact that 300 other pages were completely legitimate would be irrelevant.

The whole point of all such efforts seems to be to avoid registering your copyright. Maybe this is tougher in other countries, but here in the US, registering a copyright requires filling out a two-page form and paying $45. Why go to all this trouble to mail things to yourself or come up with some other complicated scheme? Why not just pay the $45 and do it right?

A legal registration gives you a presumption of ownership in any court. Unless someone else can show that he registered the same text or images before you, the courts will recognize you as the rightful owner. Someone else's claim that he created the picture and you stole it and registered it before he got around to it will pretty much be ignored: That's the whole point of copyright registration. If you didn't bother to register your copyright, and someone else stole it and then did register it, you're pretty much out of luck. That may sound harsh to a victim, but if it wasn't so, if anyone could say he'd created the image before your copyright, then copyright registration would be worthless and it would be almost impossible to protect anything.

2. Personally, I've never used any technical means to protect my creative work because I don't care enough to bother. I know my work has been stolen a few times and I just don't care. (I once saw the beginning of an editorial I had written on one of those "download a pre-written term paper" sites. I wasn't going to subscribe to the site so I could see the whole thing and see if it was all mine or if they'd cut and pasted mine with others, but either way they stole my work. So someone is not only selling an article of mine for money, but selling it to students to use for cheating, which makes for a double ethics violation!)

Any technical protection is surely beatable by a suitably sophisticated thief. You can make it harder, but you can't stop them. But this is no different from protections of physica property. A lock on the door of your house isn't absolute protection against a thief. I'd guess my front door lock would slow down a true professional thief by a few seconds. The realistic goal of any such protection is to keep the clumsy amateurs out, and maybe maybe to be inconvenient enough to the professional that he'll go elsewhere. With that in mind, anything from disabling right-click-and-save to digital watermarking is worth SOMETHING. The question is whether the amount of effort required is worth the gain.

You realize, don't you, that visible watermarking can be beaten too? In most cases, a few minutes with a clone tool will remove a watermark without leaving any obvious traces. I did it once (for a client who wanted to remove her own copyright statement, I hasten to add -- she hadn't kept the original after adding the watermark and now wanted it off). I didn't work that hard at it and I'm sure an expert could study the image and see the traces. But someone more skilled or willing to spend more time could surely make it very difficult to detect. Or as watermarks are normally put at the edge of an image, why not just crop them off?

Ultimately, your only real protection is the threat of prosecution. Just like your only real protection against a burglar is the threat that the police will arrest him and prosecute him. Anybody can grab an image from a browser cache. Anybody can break a window and enter your house. What stops people in either case is not primarily the security system, but the fear that they'll be caught, arrested, and fined or jailed. (Well, one might hope that the real protection is that most people are honest. If everyone was a thief, there'd be no way the police could track them all down.)

Okay, maybe that was more like 10 cents worth.

[felgall]

If you set the resolution of the image low enough before adding the watermark then any attempt to remove the watermark will reduce the resolution to the point where the image is unusable (at least with JPEGs where every edit lowers the resolution).

At least watermarking means that the thief has to make an effort to steal the images. Any other method can be bypassed in two mouse clicks.

In most countries copyright is automatic and you don't need to register it at all. Many countries do not provide a way to register a copyright.

[mdjo]

If you set the resolution of the image low enough before adding the watermark then any attempt to remove the watermark will reduce the resolution to the point where the image is unusable (at least with JPEGs where every edit lowers the resolution).


At least watermarking means that the thief has to make an effort to steal the images. Any other method can be bypassed in two mouse clicks.


Absolutely true. Removing a watermark requires the thief to spend, what, 15 minutes to possibly hours of work depending on his skill level, software, and how high quality he needs the result to be. My intended point was just that it's far from absolute protection. It's like a lock on your front door: It will keep out the incompetent thieves and prevent amateurs from deciding to rob you on the spur of the moment. To the true professional, though, all it will do is slow him down for a few minutes. Is that better than nothing? Certainly. But don't delude yourself into thinking that it's the technical equivalent of having a brigade of armed guards patrolling your property.


In most countries copyright is automatic and you don't need to register it at all. Many countries do not provide a way to register a copyright.

I plead complete ignorance on how copyright law works in other countries. But here in the U.S., anything you create is automatically copyrighted: you don't have to register to have a copyright. But you have the option to register, and if you do, that registration certificate gives you a legal presumption in court that's very difficult to overcome. (Also, a technicality: If you don't register, you can only sue for actual damages. If you do register, you can also get punitive damages.) I'd tell any American: if you think that there are any circumstances where you would go to court to defend your copyright, pay the $45 and register. (I generally don't bother. I've only registered 2 copyrights in my life. Mostly because I don't make a living off my writing.)

PS There's a common misconception that you have to "apply for" a copyright. You don't. You automatically have a copyright whenever you create something. It's like having property rights in your home. You don't buy a house and then apply to the government for the right to keep trespassers out. You have that right the moment you take possession of the house. Same thing with copyright. Registering is just that: documenting your rights, not getting them.

[felgall]

In Australia you can't register a copyright, it just applies automatically.

That registration fee in the US could be very expensive if you have thousands of web pages and update them regularly. Could come to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year registering the copyright on the new material each time you change the site.

[mdjo]

In Australia you can't register a copyright, it just applies automatically.


Hmm, so if you claim that someone stole your work, what evidence can you give that you are really the owner? If he claims that you stole it from him, what evidence would a court accept? How does that work down there?


That registration fee in the US could be very expensive if you have thousands of web pages and update them regularly. Could come to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year registering the copyright on the new material each time you change the site.

Well, you don't have to register each article or each photo separately. You can register an entire website as a single work for a single fee. And they've thought of the problem of a web site that is constantly updated: You can register new contents in blocks periodically. I forget what the time period is, whether it's a year or every 3 months or what. Of course that brings up the issue of how you prove ownership if, say, you are registering updates every 6 months, so you register in January 2007, add a new photo in February, and then someone steals it in March. I don't know how that would actually work in court. Maybe if the new material is similar to or clearly goes along with the sort of material you had before, that would give you some presumption.

[KDLA]

Well, you don't have to register each article or each photo separately. You can register an entire website as a single work for a single fee.

That could be a problem if you use elements of a website in other designs, as many designers do. In that case, you would need to register each element, than the whole; else, the whole is only protected as the whole.

KDLA

[mdjo]

That could be a problem if you use elements of a website in other designs, as many designers do. In that case, you would need to register each element, than the whole; else, the whole is only protected as the whole.

Fortunately, that's not how U.S. copyright law works. If you write a book and register the copyright, and then someone else steals one chapter from it, he cannot defend himself on the grounds that only the whole book was copyrighted and not each chapter.

If that was not true, copyright laws could easily be evaded: You could copy an entire book or an entire web site but leave out one word and you'd be in the clear.

There is a doctrine called "fair use" that says you can legally copy small sections of somebody else's work, like you can quote a few paragraphs and then give your own comment or rebuttal, or you can copy one page out of a book to pass around your classroom or show your friends or whatever. The law specifically refuses to define exactly how much a "small section" is, but leaves that up to the judge in each case. If you copy one paragraph out of a book, you're clearly safe. If you copy half a book, there's no way you're going to get away with it in court. But of course there are hazy cases: Can you copy an entire page? Two? Three? There have been some court fights over this sort of thing.

I don't know anything about the laws of countries other than the US, but I'd guess they must be similar. I wouldn't think that any country would want their courts to be prosecuting people for copyright violation because they used a one-sentence quote from somebody else's work, or on the other hand letting somebody off because he left off "The End" when copying somebody else's book.

I don't know how fair use applies to pictures. Logically, I wouldn't think I could copy one picture out of a clip-art collection and call it fair use: The whole point of a clip-art collection is that they want to sell the pictures. But if I wrote an editorial in which I copied a picture from somebody else's news story and then explained why I believed the picture to be a fake, my instict says that should be legal. If not, newspapers could routinely print faked pictures and sue anyone who tried to point out the flaws. But I'm just speculating here, I don't know what the law actually says. (And speculating and guessing are so much easier and more fun than actually doing research and finding out the facts.)

[KDLA]

I wasn't referring to books, I was referring to the graphics of a web design (since this is posted in the Graphics section). Registering a whole website would protect the graphics within the whole website, but if you were to use a graphic element from that website, insert it into another as many designers do, the copyright would be harder to define. Thus, my point that it would be better to register per element, so you have that portability.