In the “digital age”, it’s hard to think of what truly are the effects of “digital theft”. Really, what’st he harm in ripping an image off a website and throwing it up on your own?
I have to admit, I figured it was mostly harmless. That is, until Doug Alcorn tipped me off to the sad story of David Leeson. He happened to be “lucky” (Relative term) enough to wind up on the front lines of the Iraq war, and snap some truly amazing high-resolution images of the action. When it came time to come home, a US Army official convinced him to hand over some of the images for use in a yearbook, chronicling the event. Almost without hesitation he did so, and then his trouble began. You can read his story for the full details.
How can someone protect themselves from this? I’m sure alot of people would think he was kinda asking for trouble by giving away full-resolution originals without any paper trail or binding agreements, but surely there exists technology to help this. EXIF data is a good start, but hardly “foolproof”. It defeats the most basic attempts of passing off someone else’s work as your own, but how do you do anything more permanent? Watermarks come to mind, but they can easily be cropped out or simply render the image unprintworthy. One of his readers simply recommended a binding legal contract, which I’m sure would stop any dissemination of an official capacity, but it doesn’t do anything much to deter against individual copying.
Working in the Visualization lab here for the USACE, I can kinda sympathize with him. We routinely got burned with letting a single DVD out of the lab for 1 administrator to show as an example of our capabilities & progress, only to find out that it was going to be on the Discovery Channel the next week, and we had never gotten permission to show the project in the first place! Here, we’ve simply quit releasing material to anybody (even our own bosses) without proper written consent & approval, and then with watermarks, credits, and titles.
My suggestion: Steganography.
From wikipedia:
Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the intended recipient knows of the existence of the message; this is in contrast to cryptography, where the existence of the message itself is not disguised, but the meaning is obscured.
The word “Steganography” is of Greek origin and means “covered, or hidden writing”. Its ancient origins can be traced back to 440 BC. Herodotus mentions two examples of Steganography in The Histories of Herodotus[1]. Demeratus sent a warning about a forthcoming attack to Xerxes by writing it on a wooden panel and covering it in wax, which was itself inscribed with a message. Wax tablets were in common use then as re-usable writing surface, sometimes used for shorthand. The second ancient example is Histaeus who shaved the head of his most trusted slave and tattooed a message on his head. After his hair had grown the message was hidden. The purpose was to instigate a revolt against the Persians. Later, Johannes Trithemius’s book Steganographia is a treatise on cryptography and steganography disguised as a book on black magic.
Generally, a steganographic message will appear to be something else: a picture, an article, a shopping list, or some other message – the covertext. Classically, it may be hidden by using invisible ink between the visible lines of innocuous documents, or even written onto clothing. In WW2 a message was once written in morse code along two-coloured knitting yarn. Another method is invisible ink underlining, or simply pin pricking of individual letters in a newspaper article, thus forming a message. It may even be a few words written under a postage stamp, the stamp then being the covertext.
The advantage of steganography over cryptography alone, is that messages do not attract attention to themselves, messengers or to recipients. An unhidden coded message, no matter how unbreakable it is, will arouse suspicion and may in itself be incriminating. In some countries encryption is illegal.
So how would this be useful? By placing a long piece of uniquely identifiable text (probably something a rudimentary as “This image is property of X, any attempt at reproduction or alteration is not permitted blahblah”) the images can be tied to their initial photographer. The original photographer would be the only person with the “key”. I don’t suppose this would help too much with people passing off other people’s work as their own, but it would at least give photographers the ability to prove (along with other evidence like neighboring photos) that they were the original photographers.
Steganography is not an solution in itself, but seems it could definately be a key part in a larger scheme. The scheme I described could probably easily be defeated through basic image manipulations (simply scale the image, and the text is garbled or lost), but I’m sure there are error-correcting methods that can survive most manipulations pretty much in-tact. Steganography is a field that, in my opinion, has wide use in DRM and security, but simply hasn’t had much research done. Maybe it’s time to start pumping some $$$ into that.
Well, now it seems they’ve launched Gmail mobile. Just point a browser to http://m.gmail.com and you can access a stripped down version of the site. Seems to work just fine in FireFox, but that’s not really a useful test. Tonight when I get a chance I’ll pull it up on my E740 & let you guys know how it goes.
I know it’s kinda late for christmas, but I finally decided to go ahead and setup a Wishlist on 
I don’t expect anyone to really buy the stuff from Amazon, it’s just a convenient place to manage the list. It’s pretty small now, but I’m sure it’ll grow with time. 
