>  In light of that, I am exploring how
> to protect the images, so that they are not used for purposes 
> that would be
> antagonistic to our mission.  I have uncovered at least 
> eleven methods, with
> varying degrees of sophistication.  I have also learned that 
> there seems to
> be no completely foolproof way to prevent the "borrowing" of 
> your image -- 

As has been pointed out, watermarking is a good way of identifying images as yours. Since to be seen at all the image must be downloaded to the visitor's hard drive, there is no way you can stop any person who chooses to do so from misusing your online images. The best you can do is stop them when you find out.

In many ways it's just the same as if you published the images in print -- anyone can potentially scan the image from the book and use it online.

I seem to remember that Digimarc offered a service which would also track down your watermarked images if any were being used on the internet. Is that still the case?

Here in the UK, SCRAN <http://www.scran.ac.uk/> uses the watermarking and fingerprinting of images only for the higher resolution versions, which are only available to subscribers, who have to log in to access them -- any downloaded image is digitally marked with a copyright notice plus the date, time and the username and IP address of the downloading person/institution. This is all done automatically, and the software was, I understand, quite expensive.

Another way of stealing images is to link directly to the image files on your server (thus getting you to pay for the bandwidth as well!). You might well need to examine the server logs to determine if this is happening.

A quick and dirty way of checking for specific images is by using Google's image search to see if any of your images turn up on other sites. As a side note, it's also useful to check sites which link to yours -- I have on a couple of occasions found sites using our content within a frame of their site, directly linked from our server, in this way. Put "link:www.your_site.org" (without the quotes) in the search box, and prepare for some surprises!

-- 
Peter M Gray
Museums Officer

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