Image theft - mosaic and glass crafters take note

My husband emailed me this snippet to stop bandwidth piracy.

I use this .htaccess to prevent people to link to my images from their
own site (bandwidth thieves) :

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.YOURDOMAIN/" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.YOURDOMAIN$" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://YOURDOMAIN/" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://YOURDOMAIN$" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^$" locally_linked=1
FilesMatch "\.(gif|png|jpe?g)$"
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from env=locally_linked
/FilesMatch

Replace YOURDOMAIN with your own domain name in the .htaccess file.

P.S. I have not tested this code yet so I cannot confirm its validity.

Stitch Lady

"Kevin Doney" wrote in message
thlink.net...
The internet is a hierarchy of servers. Sometimes the server servicing
another countries server is in the US and can be persuaded to protest to
the
offending server. That server admin will get in touch with the next one
down
the line until the server actually hosting the offending web site drops
the
customer. Yahoo would be a good place to start since the admin of the
offending site is Mohamed Abdel Rahman )


"Melinda Tennielle" wrote in message
...
Forgive the crosspost, please. If you make mosaics or stained glass, and
have a website with images of your work, you may want to check this site
to see if they're stealing your photos:

http://www.egypt.tv/home_creation/

I am on a list whose members recently noticed this site, and it seems
most of the images are stolen - directly linked from other people's
websites. In fact, you can see that some of the artists have already
replaced the stolen images with warnings about the theft:

http://www.egypt.tv/home_creation/default.asp?LID=77
(near the bottom)

http://www.egypt.tv/home_creation/default.asp?LID=76
(about halfway down).

No one has been able to get in touch with this person, so if you do find
your image has been stolen, you may want to move or rename it, or put a
warning in its place.

M.


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On Thu, 17 Jul 2003 21:06:11 -0600,
Clarke Echols wrote:
Welcome to the Internet. Most foreign governments do not protect American
copyrights, and if you post a picture of your work, plan on it being
stolen by anyone anywhere and turned into a commercial product with no
gain for yourself. The owner of the site which is registered by .tv
Corporation lives in Cairo, Egypt, and is therefore not accessible through
the U.S. court systems.

If you don't want your ideas stolen by others, you can't post to the
internet with any degree of safety at all.

Actually you can, but it requires advanced scripting. What you do is use
a php or CGI script to check the HTTP referrer of the image, and if it's
your website, display the image. If it is NOT your website, display a
warning (or some other picture, use your imagination ).

Sorry, but that's the way the ball bounces in the 21st century...

There are ways to technically protect your work.

-Tony


Clarke

Melinda Tennielle wrote:

Forgive the crosspost, please. If you make mosaics or stained glass, and
have a website with images of your work, you may want to check this site
to see if they're stealing your photos:

http://www.egypt.tv/home_creation/


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cl00bie @ IRC - /server cookie.sorcery.net 9000, http://www.sorcery.net
We welcome WebTV'ers - http://www.sorcery.net/help/index.html#WebTV

Tony Miller wrote:
On Thu, 17 Jul 2003 21:06:11 -0600,
Clarke Echols wrote:

If you don't want your ideas stolen by others, you can't post to the
internet with any degree of safety at all.

Actually you can, but it requires advanced scripting. What you do is use
a php or CGI script to check the HTTP referrer of the image, and if it's
your website, display the image. If it is NOT your website, display a
warning (or some other picture, use your imagination ).

While that certainly keeps people from linking directly to images on
your site and server, it doesn't protect them from theft. The old
"right-click-and-save" will still work with any image on an HTML page.
Once the thief has saved your image to his/her hard drive, it's an easy
step to posting it on their web site and claiming credit for it.

While there are scripts out there that purport to "disable" the right
click function, it's a trivial matter to get around them - you just turn
off your browser's javascript function, or look at the source code and
browse directly to the image file. For that matter, you could grab a
reasonable facsimile of the image by doing a screen capture.

Sorry, but that's the way the ball bounces in the 21st century...

There are ways to technically protect your work.

Watermarking is probably the best, because it delivers an impaired image
to the thief. But even that isn't 100 percent reliable - I've seen
people with good photoshop skills erase a watermark to the point where
the image looks almost as good as the original.

You can also turn your image into a .pdf file, which does effectively
disable right-click. However, .pdfs don't display directly on your Web
page; visitors have to open them one by one, a process many people find
not worth the bother. And a truly persistent thief could print the .pdf
and scan the image.

The bottom line is that there is no real technological fix for thievery.
If you want to display your work on the Web, you need to be aware of
that and not be lulled into a false sense of security by thinking you
can make it theft-proof.

--
Pat Kight

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003 13:34:01 -0700,
Pat Kight wrote:
Tony Miller wrote:
On Thu, 17 Jul 2003 21:06:11 -0600,
Clarke Echols wrote:

If you don't want your ideas stolen by others, you can't post to the
internet with any degree of safety at all.

Actually you can, but it requires advanced scripting. What you do is use
a php or CGI script to check the HTTP referrer of the image, and if it's
your website, display the image. If it is NOT your website, display a
warning (or some other picture, use your imagination ).

While that certainly keeps people from linking directly to images on
your site and server, it doesn't protect them from theft. The old
"right-click-and-save" will still work with any image on an HTML page.
Once the thief has saved your image to his/her hard drive, it's an easy
step to posting it on their web site and claiming credit for it.

That is a different issue entirely. We were discussing bandwidth theft.

While there are scripts out there that purport to "disable" the right
click function, it's a trivial matter to get around them - you just turn
off your browser's javascript function, or look at the source code and
browse directly to the image file. For that matter, you could grab a
reasonable facsimile of the image by doing a screen capture.

What you can do is Digimark your images and sue the people who infringe on
your copyright if they take the image.

Sorry, but that's the way the ball bounces in the 21st century...

There are ways to technically protect your work.

Watermarking is probably the best, because it delivers an impaired image
to the thief. But even that isn't 100 percent reliable - I've seen
people with good photoshop skills erase a watermark to the point where
the image looks almost as good as the original.

Digimark is invisible.

You can also turn your image into a .pdf file, which does effectively
disable right-click. However, .pdfs don't display directly on your Web
page; visitors have to open them one by one, a process many people find
not worth the bother. And a truly persistent thief could print the .pdf
and scan the image.

The bottom line is that there is no real technological fix for thievery.
If you want to display your work on the Web, you need to be aware of
that and not be lulled into a false sense of security by thinking you
can make it theft-proof.

Sure, but you can "serial number" your property and prosecute the thief.
This becomes problematic in countries like Turkey, Russia and China who
don't have really good reciprocal intellectual properties laws.

Pat Kight


-Tony

--
Reliable, "eggable" Unix shell accounts. http://www.jtan.com/proshell/
cl00bie @ IRC - /server cookie.sorcery.net 9000, http://www.sorcery.net
We welcome WebTV'ers - http://www.sorcery.net/help/index.html#WebTV

Tony Miller wrote:

What you can do is Digimark your images and sue the people who infringe on
your copyright if they take the image.

*nod* Yes, if you find them, if (as you note) they're in a country with
reciprocal copyright laws, and if you can afford the legal costs.

Unfortunately, such measures are beyond the technical and financial
resources of many of those who sell their creations on line. I'd imagine
the alt.crafts.professional folks, as a group, may be more savvy about
what it takes to protect their intellectual property than many of those
in the other newsgroups to which this thread is being crossposted. But
it's something anyone who sells or displays original work on line should
be know about, and be prepared to deal with.

--
Pat Kight