Software Protection
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The ease of saving images off of the web has caused a very
real problem for artists and content providers alike. If
you have placed your intellectual property on the web chances
are that sooner or later someone is going to 'borrow' a little
bit of it... without your permission.
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Protecting Your Work
There are several ways and methods to protect your art work. Digital watermarking,
a fairly new technology is probably the best protection available on the web at this
time.
Watermarks, we're all familiar with them. You hold a sheet of expensive stationery up
to the light to see it's watermark. But how in the world would you hold up a digital
photo... and will the watermark mar or distort your image. While the concept of the
embedded watermark is the same, the similarity stops there. A digital watermark can not
be seen on the image itself. The copyright information is embedded in the image, hiding
in the naturally occurring variations throughout the image.
Digimarc Corporation's digital watermark is
embedded directly into your image and is imperceptible . Digimarc can be used to protect
various forms of creative property including photographs, video, and audio.
A Digimarc watermark can contain such information as
Creator ID, Distributor ID, copyright year, Image ID, Transaction ID, and a set of image
attributes. Coupled with the company's MarcSpider which will search the web for your watermarked
images, the digital watermark presents a formidable solution to image piracy on the web.
Steganos, a shareware program
that will encrypt and hide files within existing graphics, sound, text, and even World Wide Web HTML
files, is another option. The Steganos encrypting program can be registered online while the Steganos
Decryptor is available for download as freeware from their website.
Unfortunately, Steganos does not support gif or jpg files at this time.
There is, however a work-a-round. According to Steganos, encrypted
information is not lost through multiple conversion and save processes.
This allows you to create your image as a bmp file. After you have run
it through the Steganos Encryptor convert it to a gif format, (due to
compression, jpg files will not convert), In order for the embedded
information to be read by the Steganos Decryptor, the image will need
to be converted back to the bmp format.
A Brief Look at Copyright Law
Purloining and Pilfering
Testing Your Digital Watermark
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