Re: Ideas on how to stop image theft (RE: After the recent site theft...)

How to stop Image theft.
Leave them on your harddrive.

The original poster was stunned and amazed to find someone stole his site
and filed off the serial numbers.
Been there, done that.

The original intent of the Internet was to allow information to be accessed
on any machine anywhere in the world from any other machine on the Internet.

Then came graphic browsers.

Viewing source and right mouse clicking is part and parcel of building and
viewing websites.
All  browsers cache images.  This gives you the illusion of speed and lowers
the calls to the server for graphic elements of a page, as browsers pull
them out of the cache.
So in one sense everybody becomes a thief by default.

Depending on the browser, will determine how hard it is to save any image
that shows up in a browser window. right mouse click to digging them out of
the cache.

It is also responsible for the  color behaviour of visited links as a place
holder as people surf sites.

Images have become an important part of  websites. Buttons, rules, banners
pictures, whatever.
They allow us to enhance the content of the sites.

But, as soon as I can see them, they can be mine. from right mouse click to
print screen, you show it, I can Take it!
But you cannot display them on the web and expect them to remain virginal.
Even using Flash,  images are available to screen capture.

As other posters have said, you can digimarc, cut them up into a zillion
pieces,
use low res images and an email link for hi res, meet under a bridge at
midnight complete with trenchcoats and secret handshakes.

If  the Images are the point of the website and you are building a site
retaining image copyrights, you will spend a lot of time surfing the web
using  alta vista's link: feature to track down the miscreants and firing
off e-mails, spending money on lawyers for cease and desist letters and in
extreme cases court time.

One idea that bears mention is to name your images with some unique
identifier,
(oiwjeioucxnlksjdaipuio.gif ) of course you will have to remember that this
is your little arrow gif to return to the top of the page. makes using alta
vistas link: easier, but remembering the names and having a name that
contains more bytes than the image is counterproductive.

If you assign copyright to the client, it becomes their problem, and you
will get more sleep. Unless you make it part of a site maintenance contract.

To stop Image theft, Leave them on your harddrive.

the head lemur-alan herrell
http://www.lemurzone.com
Member Web Standards Project
http://www.webstandards.org

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