WIPs and the public domain

[Straf]

As soon as you put anything online it's in the public domain. It doesn't matter how many Cs you put in circles someone is going to rip it off and use it for their own gain. I'm lucky in that I have no talent to steal but many others do have. There is nothing to prevent visitors to this site from downloading maps and taking them elsewhere for their own use. Can we open a discussion on safeguarding the IP of the artist in some way? For example non registered users can only obtain a limited resolution and/or anyone downloading an image has their session ID embedded into the image somehow.

i say this because a friend has had a map shared somewhere it shouldn't.

Thanks.

[Mouse]

Hey Straf

This isn't the first time we've had this conversation at the Guild. There are lots of other threads about copyrighting and protecting things. In fact I think Robbie mentioned something about the possibility of having a watermark automatically stamped onto anything that's downloaded from the Guild, but I can't remember which thread it was on, or what came of it. It was in a thread where Redrobes took pains to describe how to do home-brew steganography...

I'll go and see if I can find it for you

EDIT: Yes here we go - its right here. https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...l=1#post307537 You might want to point your friend over there for a few ideas on how to protect things

[waldronate]

In the US, the term "public domain" specifically means that the bit of IP in question is out of copyright protection. Again in the US, copyright is a limited-term legal monopoly granted to a creator of intellectual property in return for the IP in question entering into the public domain at the end of the term (passage of many successive Mickey Mouse Protection Acts by the US Congress has made the term of protection very lengthy at the moment). The precise meaning of copyright varies from country to country, as does the granted protection and recourses.

As Mouse points out, this topic has been discussed before and there aren't any good solutions. A motivated thief will steal no matter the attempts made to prevent it. All that you can hope to do is demotivate the thief, which is also very likely to demotivate the potential client as well.

[Straf]

Thanks, I'm reading through that thread.

[Voolf]

Straf, you can not really do anything about that. If you post it online, there will be always a way to take it if somebody is determined. The only way to really protect your work is to make a watermark before post it online. Also resize it is a good idea. Watermark prevents people from claiming image as theirs (unless they will play in PS to remove it, that is also a case). Resizing the image is a good marketing way to advertise your work. There is a chance people who like it would like to buy a full size version. Smaller version also discourage people to steal it, because it is simply too small to use for different purposes.

[Redrobes]

Yeah - check through that thread that mouse posted a link to for a quick, dirty and free way of doing a watermark that is quite hard to remove.

[waldronate]

Note that watermarking doesn't protect your work from being stolen and resold in any way. All that watermarking does is provide a means to demonstrate authorship, which in some jurisdictions can be used as leverage to seek damages from the thief: someone still has to spend the resources to locate the offending display of the copyrighted IP and then prove the offense to an appropriate authority. Watermarks only help with the "proof" part.

[Falconius]

Well watermarks also destroy the image data affected by the mark which means that the thief actually has to do some work to clear it, and in the case that he shares it with the watermark the mark also should give proper attribution. So beyond the pure legalities involved it does do something, unfortunately it also mars the image.

[waldronate]

My badly-made point was that inadvertent thieves ("just pinning it to my wall" or "posting it here on NavelLeaflet without attribution or context so that I can find it later") don't care about copyright and folks that knowingly sell stolen goods also don't care because they will either disappear at first complaint and pop up elsewhere or are in a jurisdiction where this sort of thing is acceptable. It's up to the author to expend their own resources to defend their own works. At the end of the day, it's up to each author to determine how much effort they want to expend in defending past works compared to creating new works.

Visible signatures and watermarks are like locks on doors: they keep honest people honest but don't in any way deter a professional thief. Hidden watermarks and metadata are more like attaching nameplates to items in your home or recording serial number for electronics: they can help prove ownership in the context of an appropriate legal context, but will do nothing without enforcement.

[Mouse]

I think most of the borrowing that I can see going on (and I've seen so many CG maps in so many different and unexpected places now that its obviously quite rife) is more the casual kind where people just don't think about the consequences of what they are doing to the author of the work they so thoughtlessly link to or pin.

If a visible watermark is the best way to deter such grazing pests, then I'm all for it