beaucamera said:
In my web design class, the instructor is suggesting not posting images larger than 450 pixels in any direction. The problem is web thievery. What are your ideas about image posting size and the problem that posting larger images may present. What methods do you use for image protection? Why do you use this methodology?
Wow, Virginia this question deserves a long answer. :lol:
Sit back, relax and read on.
First, your instructor is right, "free" copying on the web is widely spread and unfortunately seen by many as their right doing it - which is not the case, as we know.
1)
Personal For personal pictures, with no business or intellectual property considerations, its up to you and your intend sharing pictures with the (internet)world. Whatever the size is.
2)
Licensing In a more restrictive world, you can apply some "licensing regime" at your own consideration. A good place to look is the
creative commons initiative from Prof. Lessig / Stanford law school.
http://creativecommons.org/. For instance you can ask that your name as the author of this picture needs to be communicated. Quite often used in the academic world, where sharing is important but credit to the owners is commonplace behavior.
3)
Tracking Next step is tracking but not preventing the copying. Visible signs like watermarks, invisible signs like steganographic patterns can be applied to a picture. As I said, it does not prevent stealing, but you can prove the ownership.
4)
Closed community If you have a trusted community and would like to restrict access to these people. Most web servers and browsers support PKI (= Public Key Infrastructure) signatures. For instance a webserver owner can hand out certificates for the community, so he knows and controls who has access to his media.
5)
Identification Unique identification of every single access. Imagine that every single download of your website is individually and uniquely signed. Of course you need the infrastructure in point 4) in place to provide that service. The ISO Standard organisation
www.iso.org is doing exactly this in a fully automated way.
6)
Prevention You need to apply DRM (=digital rights management) technologies to your pictures. Basically you encrypt your picture, and every time a customer opens the picture, your licensing server gets contacted and issues a kind of unlock key if the proper credentials are presented. Most of the digital content companies in "Video on demand" environments are using some sort of DRM technologies. A famous example is the
fairplay technology in Apple's iPod music device.
More protection also means also more effort on your behalf to enforce it.
It's up to you, cheers,
Andy