Image protection / preventing copyright infringement

21 Nov 2009

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	Image protection / preventing copyright infringement

Solution Preventing the unscrupulous from stealing images from your website, like most other forms of media piracy, is sadly an issue for all websites and for which there is no genuine solution. However, there are methods that can be put in place that may make a potential thief think of going elsewhere to try to take images they would find useful.

At the most basic level you can/should attach copyright information to your images. You can do this by populating the proper EXIF and IPTC fields with your copyright info for JPEG image files. There are freely available image viewers such as http://www.irfanview.com/ that allow you to edit IPTC Copyright fields. These differ from EXIF data, in that EXIF data is saved to photographs by the camera the photo has been taken with. Information in all these fields can still be easily edited/removed however.

Secondly, right clicking can be disabled through the use of Javascript. It is a simple process to install a script to do this, however disabling right clicking is by no means fool proof as users can easily view the source code of the page still. Also it is easily circumvented in most browsers, often just with four clicks of the mouse to disable javascript. Also, in terms of site usability and user-friendliness, this is heavily frowned upon. Users to do not like having their right click options taken away, it is seen as draconian and highly annoying by most web users and can be a quick way to drive visitors away from your site. A simple script can be installed to your website for £25 + VAT.

Thirdly - probably the most effective option of these three - is clever use of CSS can allow a transparent image to be overlayed over images on the site, so that when a user right clicks to save an image, they are only able to save a transparent image, not the real image underneath. This has the advantage of not effecting the overall user experience in any way, but again this can still be circumvented quite easily by those determined. The only downside is that a CSS approach will not affect images added through the content editor of the software (i.e page content that you edit), only images positioned as part of item markup in the software. A CSS based solution could be implimented for £75 + VAT.

Bear in mind that anyone who knows what they are doing will simply press 'print screen' on the keyboard and paste the clipboard content into a paint/photo programme to save your images, whichever of these methods you choose.

The only surefire way to really reduce the likelihood of people reuseing the images is to watermark them. An example of one of clients currently using watermarks for their imagery is http://www.puralife.co.uk/buy-now-c106.html

You may not feel it necessary to watermark small images on the site, as they are often of such lower quality that many would not find them useful. In this way, watermarking can be very effective when you have high resolution images that you are concerned will be stolen and used elsewhere.

Of course, people can still find ways around watermarks with clever editing and cropping of images, but this goes beyond the dedication of those most likely to stop by your site and take your images to use elsewhere. Watermarking can be done once a suitable graphic/logo is provided and is best performed in batch on images, installing watermarks individually to images is much more time consuming. Initially creating a suitable watermark is often the largest part of the work, then applying it to batches of images is a straightforward task. For a quote on watermarking a batch of images using a supplied logo or the existing logo of your website please get in touch. Prices for initial watermark creation and application to a batch of images should generally start from £200 + VAT, as a rough guide. Reapplying a watermark to future batches of images would be performed at typical hour work rate, £75 + VAT.

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02 Mar 2009 09:32 AM