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

>True enough. I think the modification on the graphic has to be pretty
>extensive in order to remove the watermark (I could be wrong, since I have

>never tried it). It would be interesting to know if numerous format
>conversions would cause the watermark to degrade in quality...

Are we talking about a visual watermark (like a logo you can see on the picture)
or a hidden one in the binary data of the image.

Hidden watermarks are useless. I can wipe them out in a second by turning the
image into a bitmap and back. Or any other format that stores nothing other
then the location and color of non transparent pixels in the image.
One good method is a screen capture for instance...

Don't pay for software to add these in because any thief can figure out what
I've just stated in only a few seconds.

Ways to deal with it?

Well, a visual watermark like the logo idea. Put in such a place that it hurts
the quality of the image to remove it.

Another trick is to use something like photoshop 5.5  or fireworks 3. These
apps can slice up your image and reassemble it in html tables.

So make 2 pixel tall slices all the way down the image... If it's a 200 pixel
tall image that means 100 seperate images assembled into a table. That makes
it a real pain to grab it down for the casual 'right-mouse click' thieves. espially
if you go into the code these apps generate afterwards and make two or three
of those table cells display not an image; but put that image as the background
of that cell... :)

Another trick, if you have flash...
Make a 2 frame flash movie that contains the image in frame 2... Now add an
action to the flash movie in frame 1 that checks it's URL before playing...


Put something like this:

Set Variable: "mylocation" = _url 
If (mylocation  ne "http://www.mywebsite.com/urltest.swf") 
   Stop
   Unload Movie (0) 
Else 
   Play 
End If 


where 'urltest.swf' is the filename of your flash movie.

This will prevent the movie from playing unless it is located at that URL. Not
only will it not play, it will unload it from the browser.

If you publish the flash movie with the 'protect from import' option set, they
cannot re-edit it and thus cannot undo this script.

Again this doesn't stop good screen capture software. Nothing can stop that
that I know of. Perhaps a Flash movie that unloads when the browser window is
no longer the focus. So the moment they go to start the screen capture it turns
off the flash. :)
That will stop paint shop pro's screen captures.

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