Image protection

**Maggy** · 23-04-2004, 17:19

I know about placing a 'watermark' into an image to protect copyright but what other ways are there to protect an image on the web?

Incog.

Chris W · 23-04-2004, 17:23

you can disable right clicks on a page to stop people from easily copying and pasting the image. There used to be a thread about it on here, but i can't find it now.

It involves putting javascript on the site, and when people try to right click or use the ctrl button it will popup with a message saying it is not allowed.

Edit: there is a script here that should do it

andygrif · 23-04-2004, 17:40

Or put them into locked flash files.

Saying all that, there's no way to stop anyone using something like SnagIt, which captures whatever is on the screen at the time to a JPEG.

Bifta · 23-04-2004, 17:42

Nothing to stop people pressing the print screen key either and just pasting it into Photoshop (or whatever) or disabling javascript in their browser which will allow them to right click.

philip.j.fry · 23-04-2004, 17:43

Quote:

Originally Posted by monkeybreath

you can disable right clicks on a page to stop people from easily copying and pasting the image. There used to be a thread about it on here, but i can't find it now.

The thing about that is, that if someone wants the image all they have to do is disable javascript so it's not much of a protection. Disabling right-clicks can really really annoy people who rely on right clicks for mouse gestures.

Richard M · 23-04-2004, 17:43

Quote:

Originally Posted by monkeybreath

you can disable right clicks on a page to stop people from easily copying and pasting the image. There used to be a thread about it on here, but i can't find it now.

It involves putting javascript on the site, and when people try to right click or use the ctrl button it will popup with a message saying it is not allowed.

Edit: there is a script here that should do it

Quote:

New Features and Fixes
Browser

* Official Mozilla 1.7 RC 1 builds for Windows and Linux contain the Talkback crash reporting utility. To help us make 1.7 the most stable release yet, please submit your crash reports.
* A new option to prevent sites using Javascript to block the browser's context menu.

http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozi...EADME.html#new

Another web annoyance destroyed by the world's best browser... :pp

**Maggy** · 23-04-2004, 17:52

So the watermarking is probably the most effective method then?

Defiant · 23-04-2004, 17:57

Disabling right clicks is a good way yes. Unless you use your head and just go into source and get the image from there to copy

Richard M · 23-04-2004, 17:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by Incognitas

So the watermarking is probably the most effective method then?

Yep, even better would be a PHP or Perl script to do it on the fly so you wouldn't have to alter the original images.

andygrif · 23-04-2004, 18:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by Incognitas

So the watermarking is probably the most effective method then?

Or the Flash. It depends what you have got that needs protection, like anything really. If you've only got a few tins of paint in the garage, you'll probably not bother locking it. If you've got a Murchielago in there you'll want to stick and alarm on it.

Even if you're watermarking, bear in mind that you would still need to find some way of tracking the image's useage.

23-04-2004, 18:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by Incognitas

So the watermarking is probably the most effective method then?

In my personal experiments when this topic came up before I found watermarking to be totally ineffective. I added a watermark to an image using PSP7. I can`t remember precisely what I did but I think it was to then scale the image up by a factor of 2, sharpen it, blur it, scale it back down again and ended up with an image that was perceptibly no different from the original with the watermark removed.

**Maggy** · 23-04-2004, 18:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by andygrif

Or the Flash. It depends what you have got that needs protection, like anything really. If you've only got a few tins of paint in the garage, you'll probably not bother locking it. If you've got a Murchielago in there you'll want to stick and alarm on it.

Even if you're watermarking, bear in mind that you would still need to find some way of tracking the image's useage.

Actually apart from my own art work I've not got anything else to protect and frankly I'm flattered if folk want it.If anyone wanted to use any of my graphics I would not mind.

I was just asking out of intellectual curiosity.

therock247uk · 23-04-2004, 22:10

Disabling right click on the site nah people can get around that too easy.

SMHarman · 23-04-2004, 22:27

If you want to take an image from a site and have the nouse its pretty easy. Even with right click disabled, you can view source or edit in frontpage and the image location will be displayed.

Images are cached on the viewers PC. They can trawl through the cached files.

Watermarking will provide provenance, but not stop copying which is an impossiblity anyway, however disabling right click or similar will stop many less educated internet users.

www.thesun.co.uk seems to have a very elegant right click solution, works on text, not images.

A copyright notice should also be prominantly displayed on your site.

altis · 23-04-2004, 22:30

This is effective against peeps that can't read Javascript

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/altisuk/gokyo/index.htm