STEALING PHOTOGRAPHS AND IMAGES

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Anytime you view a photo or image on the Internet, your browser automatically stores it on your computer in your browser’s cache, which is a folder for temporarily storing images. This way, the next time you visit a previously viewed web page, the browser loads the web page’s images from your computer rather than from the Internet, making the web page load faster. Of course, any image saved in your cache can also be shared.

Naturally, this causes great concern to photographers trying to sell their work through the Internet. Few people will purchase photos that they can’t preview, but any image that can be viewed online can also be saved and stolen. To keep people from stealing images, most photographers follow some or all of the following guidelines for preventing image theft:

• Don’t place the image on the Internet at all. This is the safest method, but it defeats the purpose of trying to sell photographs through the Internet.

• Use visible or invisible watermarks. Whether it’s the word “Copyrighted” stamped across the photo’s bottom or a code hidden inside the photo’s data, watermarks can prove ownership of a photo. Digimarc’s (http://www.digimarc.com) MarcSpider image-tracking technology searches over 50 million Internet images each month, seeking out unauthorized use of digitally watermarked images. However, programs like StirMarc (http://www.petitcolas.net/fabien/watermarking/stirmark) can disable watermarks found in many digital photos.

• Post small, low-resolution preview photos on the Web. This won’t stop visitors from copying a photo or using it on their own website, but commercial publishers, the ones most likely to purchase the photo, require high-resolution images for their work.

• Break the photo into pieces, and then reassemble it on a website as a table. When somebody right-clicks the photo and chooses Save, they’ll only save one piece of the photo.

Although these techniques may delay some photos from ending up on trading sites, there’s really no way to stop people from physically scanning in a printed photo and posting the resulting file to the Internet. Popular newsgroups for sharing digital photos include the following:

• alt.binaries.pictures.cd-covers

• alt.binaries.pictures.clip-art

• alt.binaries.pictures.fine-art

• alt.binaries.pictures.original

• alt.binaries.pictures.wallpaper

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