Janis,

Since I originally posted on Orphan Works some weeks ago there has been almost no response by participants in the forum. Apparently they really don't care, or not enough to protect their own interests.

But the commercial interests pushing for the bill do care, and are likely to succeed getting the Orphan Works bill passed.

I've had an Orphan Works news/blog alert on with Google and the response although frequent and voluminous does not indicate enough of a concerted objection to deter the strong organized backers of the bill. And in an e-mail response from my Senator in Washington, reading between the lines, I think even some of the more liberal members of Congress are going to cave to corporate pressure.

I am personally unconcerned because I don't post any images on the web having had many photos stolen over a dozen years ago, which taught me a lesson - don't post any image no matter how small and low resolution on the web.

But today I wonder if people even care, or maybe they are flattered someone would want to steal their photographs.

David, I've been discussing this in some other forums and the response is the same -- not many seem interested. By contrast, commercial artists are much more unified and they have educated their members and organized writing campaigns. If photographers don't unite around this threat then maybe we will never unite. But the problem is lack of awareness about why we need to unite.

I have some questions:
1)If the law passes, do you think companies like flickr and smugmug will jump into the database business, since they already have millions of images archived by their subscribers?

2) Do you have an opinion as to why the major photomags other than Rangefinder are silent on this issue (to my knowledge)? I don't understand that, unless it's purely fear of offending corporate advertisers. I would really like an answer to that question, because I think readers need and deserve to know about major copyright issues a lot more than they need the latest gadgets.

I don't want to stop posting online because I have a little group of fans, so I guess I should start using big, fat, ugly watermarks. I hate that.

In the 70's when the current copyright law was up for a renewal and making its way through Congress I was an active member of ASMP and later on a chapter president. ASMP did do quite a bit to support positive protections for photographers in the law that was passed, but the experience taught me artists and particularly photographers are loners, disinclined to join any collective for any purpose, and that seems to be even more the case today.

1. I am not particularly concerned about companies that are large and easily identified trying to take advantage - they have too much exposure. The danger comes from Orphan Works emboldening individual art directors and small publishers to grab anything they can on the fly to use, not just to save paying out a fee, but just taking the easy, lazy way of minimum resistance, and often ignorance of copyright, or any care for anything except their own immediate concerns of the moment.

2, Today most periodical publications are like Shutterbug, owned by huge corporate conglomerates who as a matter of policy believe in "free markets" unregulated by restrictive laws. So as a matter of their general policy support the concept of Orphan Works because it restricts present copyright legal restraint on their free-wheeling predatory nature to acquire every asset they can and need as cheaply as possible regardless of the unintended collateral damage and consequences. In other words among publications today few have the independence (of the mega-corporations) to speak out freely in favor of the individual creator of content.

I think today most individuals have given up, and sold out to the corporate hegemony and the disinterest you note is submission to the obvious, we live under a totalitarian tyranny that has no respect for individual rights and is too short sighted to see the well will dry up if not protected and the goose will quit laying golden eggs if it is starved to death.

There are perceptually invisible watermarks (digital watermarks) the best known of which, and has been supported by Adobe in Photoshop is DigiMark.
See: http://www.digimarc.com/ There is a plugin for Photoshop that will allow applying an invisible DigiMarc watermark that will at least establish your ownership of the copyrights for an image you have made.

Thanks, David. You have the same depressing outlook that I do! But I haven't completely given up hope. I will check out digimarc. I didn't know it was invisible. I like that idea.
I just discovered today that a large site where I was keeping a small gallery stripped out my copyright metadata upon upload. So I closed down that gallery. My main gallery doesn't do that. If Orphan Works becomes law, I would like to see it explicitly prohibit the intentional removal of copyright info. I have read -- maybe you were the first to mention this, I can't remember -- that flickr also does stripping of copyright metadata, while retaining EXIF and key words. Unbelievable.

But -- have you heard about a new service that tries to track your images everywhere they occur on the web? Check this out:
http://www.attributor.com/products/image_monitor.php

DigiMarc has web tracking, and was the first to offer it. But that usually has a cost to the user.

I have been thinking about this problem since David

Don't loose sight of the fact that it's not only about the web. Most images on the web if prepared properly are too small to do much with. It's about any image, whether as a print or digital file floating around without identification that's at risk. Occasionally I see original photographs I submitted to magazines in the 1970's and 1980's for sale on eBay and if my name weren't on the back, those images might be at risk also. Publishers were really careless back then about crediting the photographer. Or what about the hundreds of thousands of photographic prints I've sold over the past thirty years. The proper way to sign a print is in pencil on the mat so anyone could take the print out and scan it. It only takes one careless end user to claim that they couldn't find the copyright holder.

It's about protecting our creations from misuse.

Quote:
Anyone who really, really wants to steal your work from a website will do so, regardless of how much protection is in place.

Bill,

You have some good points, although I would make one exception. Adobe does with Photoshop provide a way to save a photo securely in relatively high resolution and good image quality. You can save a photo image in Acrobat .PDF format, and if you invest in the most minimal version of the Acrobat application software beyond the free reader, you can apply security that does not allow copying/editing or printing without a password.

EXIF/IPTC is easily hacked however, because it is an open standard, so does not provide any real security assurance. However invisible digital watermarks cannot be removed and do provide proof of ownership, so even though Photoshop does not actively support DigiMarc as it did, the plugin is still available and digital watermarking only requires a mouse click to secure your ownership identification within the code of the image data itself that cannot be removed.

Finally on your last point; in the late 40's members of F/64 including Ansel Adams opened a small gallery on San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. Even at $6.00 for an 8x10 Ansel did not sell enough to make it worthwhile and the gallery was short-lived. It is not the beautiful high quality scenics that will be stolen, but the more mundane shots of everyday life that can be incorporated into ads and brochures for commercial purposes or glamour shots of beautiful models and nudes that are likely to be purloined. So nothing for you from what I gather of your photographic interests to make you feel either insecure or unappreciated.

Thanks, David. Just a quick note on Adobe's response to my question about password protection for metadata: First, it can't be done in CS3. Second, I can submit a feature request for password protection in future issues of Photoshop. Third, even if included in future issues, it will only be usable with those file types that Adobe controls, i.e., PSD and PDF. Neither TIFF nor JPEG files can be protected this way by Adobe software. I don't think your suggestion to use PDF would work for me, so it looks like Digimarc may be the only solution. Not with the tracking feature, though, at a price of about $600/year!

Bill,

I am very curious why you don't think Adobe Acrobat .PDF would work for you. I use it a lot and it is the only way I will publish photographic image files, although I don't use it with Shutterbug editorial as it is not needed and they don't work with it.

If this is something you don't wish to discuss publicly, you can reach me by e-mail privately at goofotografx@gmail.com

David,

Maybe you can change my mind on the PDF question, but: I have always used TIFF for printing and JPEG for website posting (because that's what most websites want to see). I've always considered PDF to be more of a business, text-oriented application, and I'm not at all sure how image quality would fare there. When you say PDF is the only way you'll publish your images, do you mean in print media (magazines, etc.)? That's not an arena I'm likely to be working in.......

First of all TIFF and JPEG are open standard formats and cannot be secured by any means. Anyone with minimal programming knowledge and a text editor can access and modify EXIF and any other header or attached to file data.

Acrobat .PDF is a proprietary file format, and can be secured entirely so it cannot be opened without a password, or specifically limiting functions like printing and editing.

Acrobat .PDF is fully graphics supported, and is used today by many publishers as a means to transport press ready graphics and text to presses, for instance. As well you can save any image from Photoshop as a .PDF at the same (in my opinion better) quality as TIFF, with non-lossey compression options as well, and if you have just the basic Acrobat full application the file can be secured at any level you want.

I sell CD eBooks and the content is all .PDF secured files. Those who buy the CD can view and print the content, but all other functions are secured and locked.

The Internet/WWW supports Acrobat .PDF but individual web sites may not.

I would suggest doing some research on Acrobat, it has a lot going for it on all levels, and the basic application cost for the new Version 9.0 to be released is quite reasonable.

OK, David, you've got my attention, and I may give PDF a shot......

Wait... does the Orphan Works bill make it legal for people to steal photos off of the internet if you dont send the photo in to be copyrighted?