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Image Protection
Sue Grinols
Susan Grinols has worked with digital imaging and collection management for the past 10 years and shares with us here what she has learned.
Posting images online is risky because the images aren't secure. Anyone with a little know-how can copy an image to his or her hard drive using the print screen key, a click of the mouse or a third party screen-capture program. Many users ignore or don't understand that using an image without the owner's consent violates copyright law. This concerns us as asset managers who've put time and money into creating the images, and who may be answerable to copyright owners.
The Digital Millenium Copyright Law has an anti-circumvention provision that indicates liability for anyone trying to deactivate a protection measure, whether or not the image in question is copyrighted. Of course, this doesn't help us if we don't know our image has been taken, which is where companies like Digimarc come in. Digimarc has technology that imbeds watermarks and metadata in an image. They also offer image tracking through their MarcSpider software. MarcSpider crawls the Web looking for watermarked images that have left their home Web sites. It returns a report of where and when those images have been found to the image owner. Unfortunately, MarcSpider only crawls about 15% of the Web, being dependent, as it is, on search engine technology.
Another common solution to this dilemma is to post only low resolution images or small thumbnails. Theoretically, a 72dpi printed image is useless to serious copyright offenders. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Computer Science Division of UC Berkeley collaborated on a marvelous scheme using technology similar to Kodak's Flashpix file format, which resulted in the Zoom Project. The Zoom Project displays detailed views of artwork by serving small 72dpi tiles from higher resolution files. The first image the viewer sees is a modest sized overall view of the artwork. When they click on an area of the image, a detail from the next higher resolution file is returned. As they continue to click on each successive detail, they see progressively higher resolution details, each transformed into 72 dpi tiles. This continues until the highest resolution file has been tapped. The viewer seems to zoom deeper into the artwork, seeing greater and greater detail as they go. For the Museums, the bandwidth concerns of serving large image files over the Web are alleviated, as is the dichotomous issue of making the details of a large image file accessible without giving away that large file.
But, one clever workaround for someone intent on taking and using a 72dpi image is unwittingly provided by Altamira's Genuine Fractals. Genuine Fractals was created as an archiving solution for companies in need of large resolution images, but with storage cost concerns. This software is able to resize digital files from small resolution to any size file on demand, while retaining superior image quality. Last October Altamira and Nikon joined forces to make the world's largest digital print (73' x 43') from a modestly sized (4" x 6") file captured on a Nikon digital camera. With Genuine Fractals, it's extremely easy to download a small or low resolution image from a Web site, and turn it into a high quality print, poster, T-shirt, mug, etc.
Alchemedia, a security company, provides an elegant solution for image protection with Clever Content. Clever Content is server software that works in conjunction with a client side browser plug-in. Using encryption and their proprietary technology, Clever Content protects online images from unauthorized copying, printing, saving and screen-capture. When a viewer's browser requests a Clever Content protected image, the image arrives encrypted. This prevents any third party from taking the image while it's en route from server to client. The browser plug-in decrypts the image, displays it and protects the image from copying, printing and screen-capture. A problem arises when the person viewing the image uses an unsupported browser or declines to install the plug-in. Clever Content addresses this problem by serving an alternate image (picked by the image owner) that could be the same image watermarked, no image or a replacement image.
As asset managers, we've all learned what remarkable tools technology provides. We post images on our Web pages and have colleagues and clients, distant and near, view them. Our images represent objects, document projects and serve our marketing communication needs. Even with the Digital Millennium Copyright Law's protection, it is still costly and time consuming to track down and prosecute every instance of unauthorized image use. And with existing tools on the market, copying a Web site's image is easier than ever. We need to continue educating users about copyright infringement, and stay abreast of protection technologies, always weighing the benefits of securely protecting our images while meeting our viewer's needs.
Sue can be reached at grinols@mindspring.com
2/20/01
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