mu.nu - "My Tamagotchi!" she said. "It has to poop."

October 19, 2006

Protecting Images From Theft

I recently had a photo lifted from my site and avused by another blogger. Had an ugly fight to get it off the guy's site.

How do I protect such images from theft in the future? I want to prevent the whole "right-click"/copy thing fom working.

Posted by: Greg at 01:33 AM | Comments (30) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 I know there is hot-linking prevention in CPanel - but that's all I know about it.

If they guy downloaded it and posted it to his own server it's a bigger challenge. If you have Photoshop you can embed a digital watermark identifying the photo as yours. It can't stop someone from doing what this guy did, but it can give you one more weapon to fight with.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin @ at October 19, 2006 03:30 AM

2 I'm looking for something more -- I've encountered some site that inhibit the right-click feature and other methods of copying images.

Posted by: Rhymes With Right @ at October 19, 2006 03:40 AM

3 Try this:

http://www.optimization-services.com/right-click-copy.asp?ID=4

Not sure if it works, but worth a try...

SR

Posted by: Sacramento Republicrat @ at October 19, 2006 04:15 AM

4 There's no way to do so, Greg.

Most of the "disallow right-click" hacks out there are easily defeated (there's even a standard Firefox extension for just such a purpose) and then there's the simple screenshot method.

The reality of the Internet is that any content you post can be inappropriately used by others. Period.

There are steps you can take to make the eventual process of forcing a takedown easier, and to make sure that your bandwidth isn't being used to display the image on another site (hotlinking), but as far as preemptively stopping use in the first place? Unfortunately not.

Paul

Posted by: Light & Dark @ at October 19, 2006 04:24 AM

5 You could try putting a watermark on the picture in a place where it would be difficult to crop out. Of course, it'll make your picture look crappy but it might deter theft.

Posted by: Gir @ at October 19, 2006 10:53 PM

6 Heh... I would just upload a picture of fresh dog-poop with the same name as your stolen image so that when people open his site, they get to see a big steaming pile o' dog sh!t!!!!

Posted by: Madfish Willie @ at October 20, 2006 02:12 AM

7 LOL, Madfish. Unfortunately, you can't have two different URLs with the same name, silly goose.

Posted by: Tuning Spork @ at October 25, 2006 06:34 AM

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