Ramblings, citations and "brainwaves" of a college librarian in Toronto. 475 square feet refers to the size of my home, not the size of my office or library.
If There is No Negative, How Do I Prove I took the Picture?
Published Thursday, March 02, 2006 by James | E-mail this post
Before digital cameras, if someone challenged me, that I was infringing on their copyright protected photograph, I could produce the negative I used to print the picture or digitally scanned print image. Digital images by their very nature are easily copied and can be sourced from anywhere. If you win the image resolution competition, is that proof you took the photograph? You have a 5MB file, ha! I have a 20 MB file!? Photo finishing and printing establishments, through a click-through-agreement or print form, demand that you indemnify them from copyright infringement liability by requiring that you state that you hold the copyright to all the images being submitted for processing. Standing around the kiosks where you upload your images for processing, it is obvious that many of the images being submitted were scanned from books or downloaded from online sources. The vast majority are legit, but you do see red flags on some of the content being uploaded.
A long time ago I used to license images from Corbis and other stock photography providers, quite often, but today it is too expensive. My library has a small stock photography collection on CD that I can use, but I generally look to photobloggers and sites like Flickr to source content that I cannot readily shoot myself. I wonder how long these sites will survive, when they become dominated by copyright infringed content. It is only a matter of time. This problem stops many libraries and institutions from developing image repositories. How do you determine if the uploader is the copyright holder? Before you know it you'll have a repository full of illicit content.
What we need is DRM for imaging equipment. I want my digital camera or scanner to embed an invisible to the naked eye watermark (my name and contact information for example) that is robust and can be indexed by search engines. That way when I upload an image to a sharing site, and I smack a Creative Commons license on it, I can easily search for who is using it. Similarly, someone else cannot claim ownership of the image.
USA Today had a nice piece on Flickr, on February 28th. Jefferson Graham explores its germination, influence and future plans.
A long time ago I used to license images from Corbis and other stock photography providers, quite often, but today it is too expensive. My library has a small stock photography collection on CD that I can use, but I generally look to photobloggers and sites like Flickr to source content that I cannot readily shoot myself. I wonder how long these sites will survive, when they become dominated by copyright infringed content. It is only a matter of time. This problem stops many libraries and institutions from developing image repositories. How do you determine if the uploader is the copyright holder? Before you know it you'll have a repository full of illicit content.
What we need is DRM for imaging equipment. I want my digital camera or scanner to embed an invisible to the naked eye watermark (my name and contact information for example) that is robust and can be indexed by search engines. That way when I upload an image to a sharing site, and I smack a Creative Commons license on it, I can easily search for who is using it. Similarly, someone else cannot claim ownership of the image.
USA Today had a nice piece on Flickr, on February 28th. Jefferson Graham explores its germination, influence and future plans.
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