Thread

There’s no way to stop it, which (imo) is what makes the internet great. Regardless of what the law says, anything on the internet is basically public domain. If you manage to shut one guy down, ten more will pop up in his place.

If your client intends to charge for these photographs, then I assume they’re either somewhat scandalous, particularly embarassing or oddly enlightening—in which case he shouldn’t have a problem finding a legitimate publisher to take them off his hands.

Celebrity photographs typically have value only when nobody else has seen them. Think about how fast the value of a car drops once you drive it off the lot. Multiply that by 1,000, and you’ll have an idea of how fast the value of a photo drops once it’s in the public domain of the internet, or once it’s printed in a magazine.

If a legitimate publisher isn’t willing to pay for the pics, then chances are they’re probably overvalued by the client IMO. Unless it’s porn, that is.

I’ve read that some MP3 files being downloaded legally are being embedded with the purchaser’s information to make them traceable. It’s not as obvious as the watermark but it affords the seller some protection if the files are redistributed illegally.

It doesn’t work as well as you may think. Let’s just assume that these watermarks withstand any attacks to remove it (recompression, distortion, etc). So, you have a customer_id in there, or something: your file gets leaked on the net, and you’ll be able to trace it back to one of your international customers in Russia, from whom you have a creditcard number and the unverified address he provided when signing up. Let’s further assume you do trace him down and haul him into a court of law, only to be faced with the obvious defense: his laptop was stolen.

In fact, that’s not as unlikely as it sounds. If customer zero legally buys a file, then gives away legal copies of it (say, a mixtape to his girlfriend, or whatever—and making such copies is covered under the “fair use” doctrine in many countries, including mine), who burn it on disc and make further legal copies, it’s not unlikely that one of these copies might turn up on some filesharing site.

So, in the end, you’re almost always competing with “free”. Speed, quality, convenience and customer loyalty are the key words here, but if there is a magic solution, the content industry would surely like to learn about it.

The most important point here seems to have been overlooked - who IS this famous person?

Hello? Did you read my comment about Digimarc?

I discovered that a lot of people are not clever enough to even rename the file after copying it and publishing to their own site/domain.

That’s a way I retrace photos that are ripped from my site through Google, but OK, I assume you don’t even want to get to that stage.

And, did anything work for you? watermarking? project went thru?

There’s quite a few things you can do, but as everyone said, there is no safe method of doing this. You can the flash route, or something involving Javascript.

Check out the blog What Would Tyler Durden Do? to see how they’ve implemented theirs.. Can’t drag or drop or right click. Annoying, considering they have some great hi-res images, but effective. It has enough protection that I don’t bother to view source or print screen at all - seriously. I just felt it’s more of a hassle than anything, considering the sheer amount of images I’d be operating on.

Sorry mr_dimsum but unfortunately the What Would Tyler Durden Do? site doesn’t quite stop you from right-clicking images. What they have actually done is placed the image as a background url image to a div so if you view source then you can get hold of the images if you really want to. Also web-scrapers would also probably be able to get at them too. For instance on the main page there is a story called - DO NOT WANT. The main image for that is here :

http://www.wwtdd.com/ul/8961-pr100.jpg

so unfortunately there is really no way of protecting images.

Sorry! 😉

Best wishes,

Mark

Mark,

Never said it was fool-proof, just annoying to the point where I wouldn’t bother finding ways to circumvent it to get an entire photo set, knowing that some may be 5-10 images in length, for example. 😊

To be more specific, check out the photo galleries section of that post here.. That’s what I was referring to, rather than the main image associated with every post.

Ah I see what you mean now. More difficult I guess but probably not impossible if some low-life really did want to steal the images. Also they aren’t zoom-able as far as I can see so you could just do a screen-grab if needed but I do totally see what you mean now.

Best wishes,

Mark

P.S. Warning to anyone before clicking on the above link as it may offend some people. Sorry I linked to that one too but just took the first story on the page.

LOL! Hilarious post-script, man.. It’s only offensive because it’s Ellen. 😊

It’s personally thwarted me from saving pictures, or at least it has for the majority of the time. But yes, this would probably only work sometimes. For those really motivated, it’s a pretty simple, but tedious process to get through it no doubt.

Since the OP is looking for something, possibly combining JS and watermarking would be the best route to go. A previous poster also spoke of watermarking with the registered users name or something, so that’s a good one too I suppose. I’m sure it’d do the trick and thwart enough to not distribute.

Suppose the question should be considered what measures are best to reduce illegal activity rather than what will stop it I suppose.