Re: Hall of Shame

**"* P* L* <t*@spamfodder.com>**

> Christopher Lindsey's idea of a Hall of Shame is a terrific idea.  We 
> should share the names of thieves so we know to be vigilant.

Well, it's Philip Greenspun's idea.  I'm just stealing it.  I wonder
if I need his permission now...  ;)

> Christopher, can you share with us how you make your images theft-proof?  I 
> had a web site in the late 1990s, but I took it down because my pix were 
> being lifted by others.

I do three things:

   1.  I embed a a secret message in the image (a practice called 
       steganography) so that if I ever find an image on another site,
       I can prove that it's mine based on the hidden message.

       This is similar to what Digimarc does with their watermarking.

   2.  I put an actual copyright notice in the bottom left corner of
       my message in an unobtrusive, but readable way.

   3.  I split the images up into smaller pieces, then store the filenames
       and order in a locally-stored database.  When a user requests a
       page with an image (i.e.

          http://www.hort.net/gallery/view/mag/magvi41

      ) the script queries the database, then reassembles the image subparts
      in the proper order using HTML tables.

      If someone tries to save the image, they're only going to get a small
      piece of it.  The filenames are all meaningless (it's a computed MD5
      hash of the file itself, so I can tell if they become corrupted),
      so it's not easy for people to reassemble them by filename.

There are obviously still ways to steal the images:

   . Screen capture -> still has copyright notice and steganography
   . Screen capture + crop out copyright -> still has steganography
   . Reassemble image -> still has copyright notice and steganography
   . Reassemble image + crop out copyright -> still has steganography

The hidden steganographic message can be damaged through image manipulation
like resizing, adding noise, etc.  Fortunately, this usually compromises
the quality of the image as well, so the only way to remove the message 100%
is by making the image pretty darned ugly and useless.

Obviously, these are all pretty techie solutions.  All of the programming
that I use is home-grown too, so it's not something that would just work
on someone else's system.  :(

Although the hort.net fund drive hasn't been as successful as I'd hoped,
we still managed to raise enough money to make some significant changes.
I plan on buying a bunch of disks this week to set up a one terabyte RAID
so that people can use hort.net to share horticultural images.

To photographers on the list: if you could set up your own gallery at
hort.net that automatically incorporated the above features, would you
be more willing to put photos online?  If it was free?  If it was $10 or
$20/year?

Chris

http://www.hort.net/gallery/      3570 online plant photos and growing!
http://www.hort.net/gallery/date/2004-11-08/       The latest additions
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