A method of protecting ownership of photos

It's true that a dedicated image thief can easily re-write the EXIF data or
erase it altogether but there are some methods that provide enough
protection that any respectable host (Pbase etc) can quickly identify
ownership and remove plagiarised works. Not publishing valuable photos to
the Internet is still the best protection.

Microsoft provide a free application for Explorer called "photo Info" This
allows you to add copyright notice and Identity information to the EXIF
data. There is provision for a URL which should contain your full copyright
notice.

Honest people will thus be able to discover the owner of the work and
(provided there is contact info) make contact if they wish to buy a license
to use the picture. Image thieves may well wipe this data from the file they
try to pass off as their own or alter it but as long as you have your image
on a web site accessible to hosts like Pbase, they can very quickly identify
the picture and the owner then delete it from their servers.

A trade off is that Photo Info shows you EXIF data at a single mouse click.
Not much you can do with what you see (can't highlight the info) but if you
are looking for information quickly, Explorer with it's RAW and Photo info
extensions is still about as fast as it gets.

Douglas

What's to stop a thief from just downloading the same software and
adding their own copyright. Any competent programmer can change
the exif data in an hour or two. It was meant to be information not
a security stamp. It is not up to Pbase to police copyrights
because they would be also put in the position of interpreting
contracts between copyright holders and posters and they would
open themselves to litigation if they failed to do so in some way.

Doug do your own heavy lifting. If someone has wronged you with
copyright violations follow the legal recourses available and stop
whining.

w..


Ryadiia wrote:

It's true that a dedicated image thief can easily re-write the EXIF data or
erase it altogether but there are some methods that provide enough
protection that any respectable host (Pbase etc) can quickly identify
ownership and remove plagiarised works. Not publishing valuable photos to
the Internet is still the best protection.

Microsoft provide a free application for Explorer called "photo Info" This
allows you to add copyright notice and Identity information to the EXIF
data. There is provision for a URL which should contain your full copyright
notice.

Honest people will thus be able to discover the owner of the work and
(provided there is contact info) make contact if they wish to buy a license
to use the picture. Image thieves may well wipe this data from the file they
try to pass off as their own or alter it but as long as you have your image
on a web site accessible to hosts like Pbase, they can very quickly identify
the picture and the owner then delete it from their servers.

A trade off is that Photo Info shows you EXIF data at a single mouse click.
Not much you can do with what you see (can't highlight the info) but if you
are looking for information quickly, Explorer with it's RAW and Photo info
extensions is still about as fast as it gets.

Douglas