Hello, I have to admit, I was a little confused by some of the comments on this list. I responded to the initial question from Tim Munro about a "fast and effective method of achieving some theft protection" on July 29th.
When I mentioned that I had some success using products from Invisitec (http://www.invisitec.com), I don't believe that I ever said that their programs would make it impossible to steal the protected images nor did Invisitec's various product descriptions on their web site to my knowledge. :-) The use of protection using JavaScript was mentioned and invisible images on top of images which is what the specific product by Invisitec (which actually uses Perl) does along with a few other things... They have several different products in different price ranges for different security needs and more solutions on the way as well. It just doesn't seem right to criticize their product for not doing things it was not designed to do. Kind of like buying a little Canon ELPH LT and then complaining that it doesn't perform like a EOS 1V HS. Anyway, here are some other image protection products by other companies that may be of use to some people here. Artistscope has various levels of protection for images and even entire web sites. Different levels of protection apparently using scripts, plug-ins, and secure servers. I was originally interested in purchasing a product from this company last year but could not get it to work properly and as customer service was unwilling to help me so I decided to look elsewhere. Others may have better luck: http://www.artistscope.net/ Here is another image protection product which apparently uses JavaScript. I don't know much about it: http://www.cellspark.com/imagesafe.html As Henry Posner mentioned, Digimarc is one possible solution to finding out who has stolen an image using stenography. Looks good, but if I remember correctly it wasn't cheap and I would also like to stop people from getting my images in the first place if possible rather than writing them later: http://www.digimarc.com/imaging/ibfeatureschart.htm Serve Safe uses a plug in and secure server it seems. It probably works well but at $10 US a month for 20 images. Ouch! I thought that I really couldn't afford to pay that much on top of my usual hosting fees: http://www.servesafe.net/ Isn't Macromedia's Flash a fairly secure method of displaying images on the Internet? I was told that without the plug-in the images are not visible and with the plug-in it pretty much prevents the images from being copied. I'd like to use it to create slide shows of some of my images but I have found the learning curve to be rather steep: http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/ Of course no method is perfect, just as the ultimate camera (made by Canon of course) does not exist. Personally, I use rather low quality watermarked jpeg images, Invisitec's Protec for now, and encrypt the source of my homepage as well. 95% of the people who would be interested in my images are not technically savvy. If someone wants to take the time to find a way to copy on of my photos just to get a nasty letter from my lawyer or end up in court if they use it without my permission then it is fine by me. :-) I'm just trying to slow them down a bit. I hope this helps. Regards, Ron Beaubien * **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************
