Victor Patterson wrote: > 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.
There are basically two approaches that can be taken in software: recording the copyright in a non-image portion of the file (metadata) or modifying the image data itself. Metadata cannot be made "robust" in that if you can view or print an image, you can copy it and remove any copyright. For common file formats, it's completely trivial to strip the metadata. PDF and its security options offer more protection and represent Adobe's effort in this direction. But in the absence of special hardware, it will always be possible to break copy protection or strip metadata. The DVD folks tried very hard, but you can now find DVD decoding and copying software on the net in seconds. Modifying the image data has a different set of problems, and there's no known way to make such marks both invisible and robust. At best, Adobe could spend a lot of money and time to come up with something that approximates the quality of Digimarc's patented technology. The most robust methods, as suggested by other posts in this thread, are not ones that software vendors can implement. Software vendors can only provide solutions of the "keeping honest people honest" and "making it more trouble than it's worth to most people" variety. Russell Williams =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
