Hi everyone. For the last few months I have been hovering in the wings just looking and learning from the Pro-Dig discussions. The friendliness of Pro-Dig members and their genuine eagerness to help each other is terrific. I am now ready to put my head just a little bit above the parapet on the problem of "embedding" copyright information in digital image files. I have come to the conclusion that the only way for the problem to be dealt with satisfactorily is for companies like Adobe to take it on board. Anything else is really just tinkering. Photographers generate a lot of income for companies like Adobe so surely they have a duty to come up with a security feature in their programs to prevent the accidental or deliberate removal of copyright information from image files. I think most of us would be happy to pay a reasonable premium for a program with this feature. Most companies have customers' wish lists - perhaps it is time for us all to let Adobe et al know our views. I was delighted to hear in David Gordon's email that there is an EU Directive in the pipeline to make illegal the removal of copyright information from a digital file. This makes it all the more important for copyright information to be robustly imbedded so that there are no grounds for a publisher to throw his hands up in the air and claim he didn't know to whom a particular image belonged. Slightly digressing I believe there should also be a legal obligation on all users of images (newspapers, magazines, websites, books, etc) to acknowledge copyright adjacent to all published images. This includes a publisher�s own images. If copyright is genuinely not known it should be acknowledged as such i.e. � not known. If such a legal obligation was in place it would facilitate DACS-type organisations worldwide to do their job more easily and successfully. More on this hobbyhorse of mine at a later date. Regards Victor Patterson www.mediaphotos.com <http://www.mediaphotos.com/> 54 Dorchester Park Belfast N Ireland, BT9 6RJ Tel: +44 (28) 9066 1296 Fax & Voicemail: +44 (7092) 356429 Mobile: +44 (7802) 353836 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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