- Claim your copyrights through copyright notices on your Web pages, or by using visible watermarks where appropriate.
- Place digital watermarks in all your images to provide persistent communication of copyright and to make it simple for a viewer to identify and contact you.
- Pursue infringements with cease-and-desist letters, and legal action where needed.
Protect Your Copyrights
by Gerry Hunt
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Newspaper publishers must be wondering whether to throw in the towel in their efforts to protect images posted on their Web sites. Even though they post copyright notices, there is little they can do to prevent infringement. Major Web sites like those of USA Today, The New York Times and others expose their content every day to millions of viewers who can copy images with a single click of a mouse.
Solutions are being developed, and for publishers wanting to be proactive in dealing with image copyrights, there are several major and complementary options.
1. Visible Watermarks and Copyright Bars. A visible watermark is a symbol added to the image. It may be a logo or a copyright symbol placed on the image using tools like Adobe Photoshop. The benefit of visible watermarking and copyright bars is instant visual indication of who owns the image. The downside is that visible marks are obtrusive and can be lost when an image is cropped.
2. Encryption. Tools like IBM's Cryptolopes and InterTrust's Digiboxes offer secure containers that can be used to keep images encrypted, releasing them only to authorized buyers. The content is encrypted with a key, which is provided to customers to unlock the container and retrieve the image.
Secure containers offer a reliable means for delivering publications to paying end users but are impractical for images that are meant to be readily viewed on a news Web site. Furthermore, once content has been released from its container by an authorized user, it is no longer protected.
3. Digital Watermarks are visibly imperceptible identifiers embedded within an image. A watermark can identify the owner or publisher of an image and can contain a unique serial number for each image. Watermarks survive through typical image edits and file-format transformations.
Tools like Photoshop include software to allow users to embed and read watermarks. Whenever an image is opened in Photoshop, it is checked. If a Digimarc watermark is found, a copyright symbol appears on the title bar of the image. This notifies the viewer that contact information is available to obtain permission for derivative use. Digimarc has recently introduced a new service called MarcSpider that searches the World Wide Web and reports back on all watermarked images it finds.
Below are several recommendations for publishers concerned with protecting image copyrights on their Web sites:
Gerry Hunt is director of industry marketing for Digimarc Corp. E-mail, ghunt@digimarc.com; phone, (503)223-0118, ext. 121.