I am not sure how watermarking works (I tried it out, and it seems to be
pretty cool), but all other kinds of protection mechanisms (flash, animated
gifs, etc.) are completely useless!

The fact is that if you can see an image, it's yours.  You don't have to
hunt through your cache, you don't have to hack flash, you don't even have
to do the "right-click -> save image" thing.  All you have to do is hit
print screen (this copies an image of the screen to the clipboard).  Open up
any image editing program, paste, and crop.  If the image is big, the users
simply has to modify his screen resolution, and if the image is bigger than
the users maximum resolution, some good old scrolling and multiple cut and
pastes will get it.

You could of course distort the image to the point where it is useless to
anyone (a highly compressed JPG will do this nicely), but then is it really
something that you want to show on your web site?

Personally, I would go with Bart's suggestion, and make a copyright notice
clearly visible.  This will discourage some people from taking the image,
and if you find the image anywhere else but your site you (or your client)
can go after the person who copied it.

Donald

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