Digital BW, The Print

Stephen,

I don't think that an invisible watermark by itself will be effective. 
Even currently it isn't much good for online use unless you also sign up 
and pay for a service that scours the web to detect unauthorised use - 
such as Picscout (they claim that their service detects 90% of the cases 
of abuse that are discovered.) I was offered a special deal on their 
services some while ago, but decided it was still rather too expensive, 
and would only make any sense if all my images were registered with the 
US Copyright Office. And of course it isn't any help at all so far as 
use off-line is concerned.

I think it is unlikely given the US bill(s) that there is going to be 
much incentive for image users to search for invisible watermarks, or 
should they find one, to try to find the owner of the image. And it also 
means it won't normally be worth going to court should you find abuse.

Depressing as you say - unless lots of Americans get some effective 
lobbying done,

Peter

Peter Marshall    -    Photographer, Writer: NUJ
petermarshall@...       
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stephengledhill wrote:
> Thanks Peter - but how depressing.  And it looks like we in the UK will fall
> in line behind the US - so what's new!  I feel powerless.
>
> Like you, I don't want to disfigure my own images on the web with visible
> copyright information.  I've not looked into using an invisible digital
> watermark in my images so don't know how good it is - but presumably the use
> of a widely recognised invisible watermarking (I googled and found DigiMarc
> for example) would be sufficient to ensure an image could NOT be claimed by
> a thief to be "orphaned".  
>
> Steve Gledhill
> http://www.virtuallygrey.co.uk
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
> [mailto:DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Peter
> Marshall
> Sent: 09 May 2008 10:11
> To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Copyright control
>
> Steve,
>
> If you put images on the Internet or publish them in books or magazines 
> that get to the USA it will apply to you.
> Even now the US copyright laws makes it virtually impossible to control 
> the use of your work in the US unless you register it with the US 
> Copyright Office, preferably before publication on the web or elsewhere 
> - as I've found.
>
> It is also only too likely the the UK government will follow the example 
> of the US on this (rather than that of Canada, which has a system much 
> fairer to unlocatable copyright owners) and UK legislation is expected 
> in the next couple of years.
>
> Read what I've written about it on >Re:PHOTO 
> http://re-photo.co.uk/?p=285 or Tony Sleep's piece on EPUK that I link 
> too - and his comments on my piece. Photographers around the world 
> should be very worried about this, and particularly those in Britain.
>
> I'd hate to have to disfigure my own work on the web (I think over 
> 30,000 images) by adding a large and fairly prominent copyright 
> overprint to every image, but I think it is probably the only sensible 
> approach if this becomes US law.
>
> Regards,
>
> Peter
>
> Peter Marshall    -    Photographer, Writer: NUJ
> petermarshall@...     
> _________________________________________________________________
>   
>
>