Images on this site were compressed using e-Vue MPEG4 technology in 2001, which was groundbreaking at the time for its DRM component and higher compression than JPG, however e-Vue is no more — we are transitioning these images to JPEG for 2004.
So, what are your options if you want to put your digital visual work online? If you're an artist, photographer, or digital artist, it's almost a neccessity to use the Internet as another vehicle for promoting your talent, and for many, it's the only way to reach a large audience and perhaps generate income on a fairly low budget. Compared to a glossy full-color printed brochure, a Web page is a very comparable but infinitely less expensive method of exposure, particularly for those who can't afford thousands of dollars in printing costs.
The E-Vue Photoshop plug-in allows you to compress images using MPEG-4 instead of JPEG, and provides limited rights management by embedding copyright information and disallowing right-click saving. Files are saved in ".vtc" format.
There are several approaches when putting your content online, beyond merely posting them on your site "in the clear," to deterring theft of your images. One is to clearly note your copyright information imprinted onto every image and post notices throughout your site pages. Another is to add an invisible watermark, which is most useful when combined with another approach, since the content can still be copied. Some online services claim they can track your image via these watermarks, but that assumes the image has not been markedly modified to remove the tracking information. More elaborate methods include converting your images to an encrypted format that requires a browser component like a plug-in or Java applet to view the content, and possibly adding a bandwidth protection script which lives on the Web server (not likely for the average artist since it requires cgi-script experience).
"Our solutions are targeted towards the artist and photographer. It was their dire need of some form of protection for their images on the net that inspired our initial research and developments," says ArtistScope's William Kent. ArtistScope was one of the first international DRM company to offer online image protection solutions, but is not well known in the United States. "Prior to this there was absolutely nothing offering any protection of the image once it was downloaded to the visitor's browser. Our systems are designed to run from any Web site or folder on the Web, and employ image
encryption to protect the files on the server from other tenants including even the Webmaster."
"Photographers and stock photo agencies have to balance between applying image protection online and broad access to images," says Larry Trevarthen, director of Product
Marketing at Digimarc. "Generally speaking, the more protection that is offered, the more difficult it is to access the image easily. Such barriers as passwords, downloadable plug-ins, and other encryption methods are used to protect valuable content, but present obstacles to easy access. On the other hand, freely accessible access potentially exposes image content to unauthorized use. Digimarc's ImageBridge watermarking attempts to bridge this gap by allowing the image owner to mark their content, and then be able to track if and where the image may travel if it is used off the image owners' Web site."
Stopping the Copy
Really large companies can afford expensive digital rights management (DRM) solutions, but for the average artist/designer (and perhaps Webmaster), these kinds of solutions are impractcal due to cost and infrastructure. So what are real world content sites using?
One of the most-copied types of content online are celebrity images. According to Content Director Greg Kudasz of Fansites.com, which offers 10,000 images of highly popular celebrities on their site, "We installed a content protection system because of the large number of images we handle, and the fact we don't want other sites loading our images on their sites directly, or copying our content and hosting it as theirs."
"The majority of our images come from photographers from whom we license content, and a system was needed to offer some sort of assurance to the copyright holder that we're trying to help cut down on piracy of their images. Also, bandwidth is a big issue. If we allowed full access or for other sites to hijack our bandwidth by embedding our image HREFs the cost would be prohibitive due to needing more servers and bandwidth."
